The reason why Bitcoin fees are high is that it transmits huge sums of money. The following is the chart of total USD value of transactions sent using it (and a couple of altcoins for comparison).

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/sentinusd-btc-eth-bch-ltc-dash-sma7.html#1y

Despite the high fees, Bitcoin is **the** cryptocurrency and it works as intended. It's just the smaller fishes, have been priced out of the blockchain, and need to wait for LN. It sucks, I know, but just because you can't afford something, doesn't mean it is not working.

Anyway...

If you look at: https://coinmetrics.io/charts/ and compare "transaction volume in million USD" and "Fees" on the linear scale, there current period is on the expensive side, but not that much, and there have been times in the past when sending $1MM on BTC blockchain costed more in USD terms than now.

Smaller transactions have moved to altcoins. Mostly ETH, which seems to be the king of dust transactions.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-bch-ltc-dash-sma7.html#1y

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/mediantransactionvalue-btc-eth-bch-ltc-dash-sma30.html#1y

as you can see BCH is quite high on "Median Transaction Value", despite being barely visible on "number of Transactions" graph. What does it mean? There are just handful of BCH whales moving their piles of it. That kind of proves that most of "social media chatter about BCH" is artificial. If BCH was so popular and awesome, then more people would use it, especially that fees there are so low. Instead some whales are pushing their speculative agenda and trying to pump and dump at every opportunity with piles of their overpriced coins, that their acquired from people that dumped them.

Real small users seem to use mostly Dash, LTC and ETH, in order of total "transaction value", while BTC is for now reserved for rich people, some of which were made rich, by holding BTC, and some of which are just entering the market with piles of fiat.