It will also be more expensive in terms of total transaction fees he pays because he is paying transaction fees to send bitcoin to himself.
I would disagree with that. The bitcoin he receives is going to have to be moved somewhere eventually, whether that is to an exchange to sell for fiat, to a merchant to buy goods or services, or somewhere else. If he doesn't consolidate all his received payments, then he must make an individual transaction for each one which will be much more expensive. His other option would be to consolidate his payments directly when he moves coins to an exchange/merchant/etc., but then will be paying whatever the current fee rate is for the large consolidation payment, when he could instead pay 1 sat/vbyte to consolidate his payments when the mempool is empty.If the OP has 10 unspent outputs and consolidates the outputs, he will need to pay for 10 inputs to consolidate the outputs, plus one for when he spends the consolidated output. If the OP does not consolidate his outputs, he will only need to pay for 10 inputs.
You do make a fair point that consolidating outputs with a very low fee may save on transaction fees. This may be true historically, however it is always possible that market transaction fee rates will never be as high as they are when the OP consolidates his outputs.
