The fees now are expensive, Agree to that. but these fees are not the normal unless there are complicated circumstances to that payment,
for a 222 byte payment to 1 party the fees is at max 0.0005 which is around $1.25 BTC, it's not cheap and it should be cents in maximum, but it's not as huge as 8 dollars.
also the issue is the fees would be the same for a 73 dollars or a million dollar TX, as soon as the number of addresses sending/receiving is the same.