Ethereum is the second oldest coin and that's why it's still the second highest in price. However, Ethereum have failed to meet up with its gradual price increase overtime, because of the high gas fee which has made people dump Ethereum for a similar coin with lower gas fee. Whatever shitcoin that is produced on Ethereum network remains a shitcoin and I haven't seen anything special about the upgrade of the network.
It's not just about gas fees, but also about scalability. When they have a large number of orders, they become congested and increase fees irrationally. This is frustrating for many users, especially when the network is heavily hyped for a project that makes the network busy.
L2 solutions seem to be merely alternatives and are merely additional tools. Most L2s that have been built appear to be very weak and have little competitiveness with other networks like Solana and SUI, as well as other new challengers. Furthermore, Ethereum's management has previously experienced some issues, resulting in a loss of trust from the community. Hopefully, Vitalik's proposed upgrade will be useful.
It's important to remember that making money in the Ethereum ecosystem involves exploiting yield, restaking, and restaking, and it continues like this, until at some point you become exhausted and prefer to hold Bitcoin.
Unfortunately it seems ETH will still prioritize L2 roll ups and so far there's no promising solution to the scalability problem on the L1.
Even recent upgrade is all about improving UX and making L2 better.
I guess we won't ever see ETH mainnet having fee as cheap as solana and the others.