If you want to build such a big, worldwide financial network, you need to accept the fact of taking different kinds of costs.
The same thing is about decentralized network, it has to operate somehow. If nobody will earn anything on supporting it, then what is the point of doing such a thing?
Without mining rewards, bitcoin and blockchain are pretty much totally different thing. We need to have a bounty for people willing to confirm our transactions, or they will simply stop doing that activity.
The problem is not about paying people to confirm our transactions, we were doing that for a long time and we didnt even notice it, but as the bitcoin became popular and the blockchain network not big enough for the transaction that are happening every second, transaction became slower and they have taken advantage of the situation and started speeding transaction based on the fees, and people had no choice because the fast transfer is the thing that made them use bitcoin in the first place, and by the time bitcoin reaches a higher user base they will start taking more and more.