Gas prices are high because you are using the settlement layer as a playground.

If everyone stopped using L1 and moved over to L2 to do the exact same things they're doing now (users and devs) L1 would only be using much less of its capacity because it would only be receiving the batch txs from L2s, txs fees would be < $0.05 on L1 and < $0.005 on L2. Thats with the exact same amount of txs occurring on L1 right now but on L2 instead.

The only reason we have a gas problem right now is because users and devs continue to use the settlement layer as a playground. A huge part of that problem is Lido, Curve, Comp, Tribe, AAVE and others all still running liquidity mining programs on L1... paying millionaires to continue to fill up the network at the expense of everyone else trying to make Ethereum cheap (L1 gas prices effect L2 gas prices).

Things are going to get better though, you'd be surprised how easily you can herd whales with yield. Just look at BOBAs TVL at the moment https://l2beat.com/ (BOBA is an Optimistic rollup on Ethereum, same code as Optimism)

Most of it's TVL is providing liquidity to a single DEX called oolongswap.com (Currently has 500M TVL in the dex). The reason so much money is being put into oolongswap is because they have a liquidity mining program at the moment for OLO tokens. oolong is just a Uniswap V2 fork.

Wouldn't it be cool if Uniswap ran a liquidity mining program on Arbitrum/Optimism!? well... a temperature check for this exact proposal just got a 98% yes vote from the Uniswap community.

https://snapshot.org/#/uniswap/proposal/0xe377d2b8e245404c42a6892be4232e017bf44b7fcc2e72426aa95ea5a4e01783

The above should help speed up the transition by moving some of the Uniswap liquidity to L2 and taking traders and Arbitrage bots with it but you have the option to move there right now and make your Ethereum experience much cheaper.