What he's saying is not even true for most tokens, because they pay holders simply by issuing new tokens within an unlimited supply scheme. It's impossible that networks which precisely advertise very small transaction fees can ever pay people any significant yield from those fees.
AFAIK Ethereum holders do get most of their rewards from fees, not inflation anymore, now that it has some sort of "mechanism" that somehow caps new supply. If I'm not wrong they have had sub-BTC inflation rates for a while now.
But of course, on one hand, that inflation no matter how small, is forever because ETH's supply is not capped. And on the other hand, the fees come basically from the L2 (and L3) casinos. So, as Vitalik himself is saying, it's empty trading of tokens for the sake of moving tokens around, and little to none real use. Perhaps the only real use is stablecoins in places like Argentina? Can't be a lot anyway. I admit I'm not in the Ethereum-sphere at all, so I may not be fully informed, though.
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