[T0Bi]

The point of fees isn't primarily to reward the miners. That's what the block reward is for. Under PoS validators will still get a block reward, although a lower one (90% less).

The fees are to mitigate spam attacks. You can only fit that many transactions in a block. Fees are bids to be included in a block. The higher the fee, the earlier your transaction gets included. Fees on Ethereum are high, because a lot of people want to use it.

[dsimmons]

To add: in addition to fees being used to thwart spam, EIP-1559 introduced a mechanism where these fees (not the block reward of course) are burned. One way to think of it is almost like a "stock buyback" from the Ethereum network: by reducing the supply, your ETH is worth more.

Thus, between EIP-1559 (burns base fees) and The Merge's move to Proof of Stake (a dramatically reduced block reward), there's very little net-new ETH being introduced into the system.

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