You do realize that Bitcoin didn't have high fees since the beginning, right? It mostly only started since the 2017 bull run. Also, transaction fees are through sats, not in USD, so a higher bitcoin price would mean 'higher' transaction fees. Bitcoin simply grew too much in a short timespan than the developers lacked time, and that layer-2 solutions such as Lightning aren't THAT ready yet.

Thats normal. Wait for quite some time, lightning network will change your mind once its fully up. If that's not good enough for you then feel free to buy other altcoins on the market but fees also are not that great if you choose eth related tokens. Maybe huy some on Binance smart chain projects. Bitcoin will still stay the same years from now.

For OP, why not use the lightning network? Agree with mk4, layer 2 soon will be the solution.
And addition, there are some ways to avoid such high transaction fees, just like consolidation of your small inputs from your Bitcoin wallet, it may help to save transaction fees.
If you check the thread of LoyceV, it shows how consolidating small inputs works here: [Jan 2021] Fees are low, use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs!.

The fee issue you are talking about it usually happens whenever the bitcoin transaction network gets crowded because there are more people willing to transfer their coins faster than other people and due to the nature of this network the transaction will higher fee gets confirmed faster. However, the fee are maybe high if you are only transferring a few bucks of bitcoin but if are going to transfer more than 1m bucks using bitcoin, the fee are still so good for you because you can transfer 1m dollars by paying only 10 dollars. However the fees can decrease once again when the price stays stable and we see less urgent transactions in the network.

devs 2015 promise was new BITCOIN code to make bitcoin fees go back to sub penny prices.
instead they 4x legacy to make it appear their new code was cheaper(false pledge complete). meanwhile their new code increased from pennies to dollars and legacy increased even further using their multiplier.

this was not 'a make fees cheaper game' after all. it was a make old code more expensive to promote utility of new code.

this whole game of making bitcoins fee's go up is purely done to advertise other networks users should use instead that are not as secure. dont even have a blockchain. dont even have a network wide verification system. but do offer cheap fees.

its the old. dont transact with gold as thats expensive to handle. lock it up in our vaults and we will let you play with bank notes in our new banking system.

..
if a government in 2015 said they know a 1% sales tax was alot for bananas and they will make new gov policies to get that down
then in 2017 they instead made the plain banana tax 4% while offering a new govbanana brand at 1%. saying look our new govbanana is 4x cheaper.. would you buy it and accept they fulfilled their promise.
no?.. of course not

what if they then wanted you to stop handling plain real banana's and instead lock them in veg warehouses. and and play with millibanana's on a vegan only virtual market. where the millibanana transactions were 0.001% whereby you also need warehouse managers permission to get your real banana's out when you dont want to play anymore.

i personally just want my real plain banana to be able to be traded at 1% or under again.. not this gaming stuff that is trying to imply real banana's should not be held.. as thats how the gold:bank-note game was played in the 1900's. and we all know why we moved to bitcoin to escape bank-note game

Altcoins exist to be pumped and dumped so that a small group of experienced traders can empty the pocket of the newbie masses. I'm always looking for someone to change my mind with more than one reply!

If you can't take it then just leave it. I don't even think that you leaving would affect bitcoin or any crypto even a little percent. Anyways, it is just normal that bitcoin to have high fees so are the other crypto such as ETH and other crypto that are beginning to show the transaction fee increase. It is due to the traffic on the network with all the transaction caused the bull run since 2017. But we can see the transaction fee to go down after the heavy traffic and the bull run.
We must understand a lot of factors the caused the transaction fee to increase, a lot has changed ever since the fee was just cents per transaction even the price difference is also the factor of these increase.

Yup, I won't deny that most are actively seeking profit and wealth just transfer from one to another. After all, anything tradeable are always subject to manipulation as long as whales exist.

Whether they are stocks, commodities, indices, money talks in the end

I agree, it's the value that has skyrocketed, thus the transaction fee in dollars has also risen to a significant point. I understand OP's frustration though, I was also annoyed when I moved some funds from my wallet to an exchange, the fee in dollars was approximately $15 for a $300 transaction. It might not seem much in Bitcoin, but it does when we're dealing with USD.

Do you have any proof that the miners are actually the ones who are behind Lightning? And what actually made you immediately conclude that Lightning is not the solution? (I know they've been working on LN for a few years now, but still)