Bitcoin being valuable is a feature — not a bug. I believe satoshi knew about this which was why he created bitcoin with over 8 decimals so that anyone from anywhere can still own a piece of Bitcoin whatever the price is. You don't have to be a wholecoiner to be considered a bitcoiner.
Satoshi Nakamoto was unsure about future of Bitcoin, transaction volume and value. You perhaps missed this post of the Bitcoin founder. Bitcoin value comes from its technical design and its successful decentralization, non-censorship in operations, it's not like an automatic feature.
Right. Otherwise we couldn't have a finite limit of 21 million coins, because there would always need to be some minimum reward for generating. In a few decades when the reward gets too small, the transaction fee will become the main compensation for nodes. I'm sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume.