This makes it clear that we must be careful to distinguish between the ledger (a conceptual spreadsheet keeping track of who owns what percentage of the economic community known as "the Bitcoin ecosystem" and later perhaps just "the global economy") and the protocol for updating that ledger.
We're back to this silly idea of separating the currency from from the blockchain. You can't, they are one in the same.
This "ledger" rhetoric is a paraphrase of the false idea they are separable.
The system is the blockchain is the currency is the protocol is the ledger.
You're not reading.
The Bitcoin protocol specifies the parameters of the ledger (including coin issuance schedule) and how it is updated, but that doesn't mean you can't have a different protocol that
maintains the same ledger and issuance schedule but that accomplishes this task differently under the hood. This has nothing to do with the "separate the currency from the blockchain" meme that is floating around.
Mining fees do introduce some ambiguity if they are set extremely high by the protocol and somehow cannot be user adjusted, because the effect would be similar to changing the coin issuance schedule. But that seems a moot point because users would find a way around the default setting if fees were so high as to make a difference.