You're right, it has been blown way out of proportion by the press. In fiat terms, yes it was high, but it should have been put in perspective. Even so there was a point where the BTC price for transactions was higher than desirable too. There has been a lot of research to improve scaling and lower the transaction fees. It's cutting edge, a work-in-progress, but the mainstream press has been merciless, painting Bitcoin as a finalized product.
It was not blown out of proportions just by the press but it was a reality that you were not able to send your coins a few months back smoothly and you have to pay a very high fees and longer time period for the transaction to get through and as a user we need to have cheaper transaction fees because the real use of bitcoin is to transfer anywhere in the world with less fees and now the transaction charges are really low like in the past couple of years.