But ser, isn't prolonged high fees an indicator that there's high demand for block space in the Bitcoin blockchain, and therefore it's also an indicator that there's high demand for Bitcoin?
Not necessarily.
When the increased traffic is artificial, it only indicates that someone found a way to sustain an attack on bitcoin. Just like 2017 when they spent a large amount of money to spam the network for months.
This is more palpable when you look at the market and the price. If the demand were actually rising the way the network gets congested these days, price should have been a lot higher than it is right now.
Keep in mind that people aren't buying bitcoin or actually sending bitcoin. They are just spamming bitcoin with small/dust amounts so that they can gamble in a scam market on fake tokens that don't exist, in the hopes of making some money.
Plus it's not his way of thinking, it's merely a fact. Miners actually have no choice but to be incentivized in order to continue to provide security for the network.
So far we have had no problem incentivizing miners and we won't in the near future either.
Just zoom out and look at the average price during each 4 year cycle.
* Today miners are getting 3.125
BTC reward at a price that is above $60k.
* The biggest chunk of the past 4 years miners have been getting 6.25
BTC reward at a price that was below $30k.
* The 4 years before that they were getting 12.5
BTC at a prices far below that ($500, $3000, $6000).
* ...
* The first 4 years they were receiving 50
BTC at an average of $1 or something like that!