this has been the major reason why transactions are so expensive or rather slow depending on your preference.
For a couple of months now it's been perfectly fine. You can comfortably send transactions with fees of <$0.1 and expect them to confirm in
at most half an hour, as you can see
here.
But I still agree that scaling is necessary, since increased demand for transactions would end up pushing up fees/transaction times again and that's fairly likely to happen eventually.
In the short to mid term, the best way to increase the network's capacity is to begin sending SegWit transactions. Currently, they only make up
about a third of total Bitcoin transactions, and therefore SegWit hasn't been used to its full potential yet.
Another proposal for scaling was the
use of Schnorr signatures, which could also be implemented through a soft fork.