How about demanding more transactions with lower fees by increasing blocksize ? Isn't the outcome of a block reward the same ? Who benefits from something like that ? Because the way i see it , current status only favors miners . If onchain transactions go down , this favors users . More transactions in each block would benefit both miners and users . But for sure the only entities that earn more than anybody else with current model are pools . It's basically free money for them .
An argument would be that there is no interest currently to transact on btc so no need to increase blocksize . Global transactions in crypto are hundreds of millions transactions per day . Merchants could use bitcoin instead of visa but as btc works you can't advertise it as an alternative method of payment . Of course , not everyone would be able to run a node , which is against maxis ethics .
By your logic , if blocksize never increases and subsidy is zero , network would still work fine . I'm not saying that it won't work , what i argue is that it won't be secure .