(Un)[/color]Fortunately, this will happen much sooner than once we mine the 21,000,000th coin. Looking at the graph, in 2040, every block will reward only 0.1953125 bitcoins, so you should consider that it may be more profitable to gain all the transaction fees, than the block reward, before 2140.
It is always
more profitable for miners to get transactions that are paying much higher fee, but it has always been
profitable for miners to mine bitcoin because of how bitcoin price has been moving.
For example when miners were receiving 50 bitcoins per block they were actually earning less than a dollar per block. Now that they are receiving 87.5% less meaning 6.25 bitcoin they are earning 36000000% more money (nearly $368k).
Saying they need fees when reward is ~0.19 is ignoring the price movements. 0.19
BTC could be giving them a million bucks in 2040!