Have we come full circle?

Bitcoin first caught my eye in 2015. I started buying a number of crypto currencies around mid-2017

Everything I knew about crypto currencies was from youtube, so when friends and family asked me what Bitcoin is, this was my go-to answer -- "bitcoin and crypto currencies are a new type of money which will help us transact without middle men like Visa and Mastercard." I would proceed to tell them that whenever we use a Visa or a Mastercard to make a payment these (evil) corporations take a cut of the transaction thus increasing the price of the goods and service you are purchasing. Finally I would point to how you can buy cheaper gas if you pay with Cash. (Needless to say, most of my friends and family thought I was a genius around December-2017)

Fast forward to 2021 (and ignoring all the mocking I received during the crypto winter), I finally decided it was time to actually read the bitcoin white paper. For anyone who hasn't read it (no judgement) here are a few lines of the introduction

"Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions". The white paper then proposes a solution to this problem

Given the transaction costs of both Bitcoin & Ethereum today is it safe to say that crypto currencies are suffering from the exact same problem the original bitcoin paper sought to solve?

So have we come full circle? Have crypto currencies become what they sought to destroy?

Or am I misinterpreting something? Is this era of high transaction fee just a phase and do we expect it to come down (below the transaction costs of Visa/Mastercard) once upgrades/enhancements are made to the technology?

I know some of you are going to say that things have changed over the last 10 years and bitcoin and Ethereum can still be used to transact in millions/billions of dollars with less than $100 in transaction costs and as a percentage is much lower then the same transaction if it were made in fiat currency -- to this I will point to the "small casual transactions" explicitly being mentioned in the bitcoin white paper