I wrote up a whole thing about this after I came to understand it, as well as some theoretical stuff about blockchain and preserving historical transaction data, like a year ago or something on nostr (my only publishing outlet now) and I didn't bookmark them lol so I kind of have to just write everything out every time.

I'm not the first to figure this out, there's a reason there are tail emissions in coins like grin and Monero, but since the rationale behind these decisions have been discussed, the focus has drifted to "pay miners" and not the deeper, more fundamental reason that underlies "pay miners", that everyone must cover the cost of what they get from one of these networks in proportion to their benefit or misaligned incentives will destroy the network. 

 I'm guilt of the drifting attention too for sure...

certainly aware of the free rider problem,
but everyone is always talking about mining incentives and the window shifts to what the dominant narrative is 😕

its a great explanation, thanks.