The ETH team knows that the community will be waiting for the merge, and if it continues to delay the launch of 2.0 then people will become skeptical and potentially pull out of ETH as time goes on.
Whether or not it delivers the promise of much lower fees is yet to be seen, though. I personally think that it will, but it will never lower fees to the point where retail investors can make transactions without thinking about gas.
I hope so. Otherwise, people will continue to lose interest in ETH until it goes all the way down the drain. Considering that we're still in a bear market, the release of ETH 2.0 will have little to no impact over Ethereum's price. Fees will decline, but only within the short term as network capacity stays at its All-time-high. For gas fees to remain low forever, developers need to constantly scale the Blockchain to meet users' needs. L2 (off-chain) and Sharding scaling solutions are ETH's only hope to remain as scalable as possible without compromising decentralization. Competing chains like Solana and BNB may be much more faster and cheaper to use than ETH itself, but their security/reliability is extremely weak (especially Solana).
I'd prefer to pay a high fee on ETH knowing that my transaction will go through, than paying a low fee on another chain with the risk of losing it all due to a network disruption or hack. People often prefer convenience on top of security/reliability/decentralization, so they wouldn't care more or less about this. There isn't an exact date for the launch of ETH 2.0, so this opens up the possibility for developers to continue delaying the upgrade to meet their needs. At least, we're not stuck on a single chain. Just my opinion