Ethereum fees skyrocketed to their highest levels due to the decentralized financial bubble (Defi). Smart contracts that support the Defi protocol typically require the execution of multiple Ethereum transactions exacerbating network congestion. therefore requiring a transaction fee of 357 Gwei is ridiculous. This will be a major barrier to progress if someone on the team doesn't address this.
That's certainly true, mate. Increased demand for ETH will only make fees higher in the short term. That's largely because the ETH blockchain has a limited transaction capacity. Developers are already working on a solution for this. It'll take quite some time before network upgrades are implemented for people to enjoy low fees and blazing-fast transactions. As long as gas fees remain high, it wouldn't be practical to use "De-Fi" on the ETH blockchain. Only the wealthy will be able to afford paying double-digits in price per transactions.
If you're eager to save on fees, then I'd suggest you look elsewhere. Alternative smart contract platforms such as Polkadot, Binance Smart Chain, and Cardano have ridiculously low fees and blazing-fast transaction confirmation times. In EOS, transactions are completely free, making "De-Fi" extremely practical to the average person. There needs to be more dApp diversity for people to have a choice from one chain to another. Unfortunately, most popular "De-Fi" apps are available on the ETH blockchain. Competing chains have a very limited number of dApps, making them somewhat useless to everyday people. As long as ETH has the biggest ecosystem of dApps, tokens, and services around it, people will be forced to use ETH even with high fees and slow transaction confirmation times. The ETH 2.0 upgrade gives us some hope, but changes on the blockchain won't happen overnight. It's a process that could take from months to years before ETH becomes a highly-scalable PoS blockchain network.
Nonetheless, I believe that fees won't stay high forever. Sometime in the future, fees will decline as new upgrades are "rolled out" by developers. We just have to be patient in order to achieve great results in the long run. As I've said before, there are many alternative smart contract platforms which are cheaper and faster to use than ETH itself. We can use them while developers work on making ETH great again. As long as the Ethereum blockchain remains decentralized, nothing else matters. Just my thoughts