But of course, it ought to be, and there should be no need for the middle-men, certainly not ones that take 2-4% of the transaction.
If you want subscriptions/recurring payments, stored payment methods and all the "fancy" stuff contemporary payment processors offer, you pay for it. If you just want to move money from A to B, it should be easy and it should be free.
The only way for that to happen is for it to be socially provided service.
Will this infrastructure handle chargebacks? Fraud? Stolen credit cards? Forex?
If yes, it can't be zero-cost.
If no, it won't be usable until the middle-men build all of these systems on top of it.
Neither you (the sender) nor the recipient pay anything for this service.
You may have noticed that banks/financial services companies make bucketloads of cash. Why should the cost of running the system always be pushed back to consumers? The EU/UK example points to a different direction entirely.
The problem you described is far, far simpler than the problem Stripe solves.
On that score, using a direct payment scheme, such as Direct Debit here in the UK, beats charging cards using a service like Stripe on every important point. Lower fees. Much lower involuntary churn due to charge failures. Outside the scope of SCA and all the complexity that introduces. Even for international payments using similar direct payment schemes in other places that have them, if we compare GoCardless for those with Stripe for charging cards, the currency conversion is much cheaper via GoCardless as well because they now work with Transferwise.
It's 2020. Unreliable, overcomplicated, fundamentally insecure, expensive methods to collect some money from a customer and give it to a merchant should have gone extinct a long time ago.
There's also no obvious reason why Stripe and all other payment processors and credit card issuers and banks and financial services should not be carrying the cost of all the things you've mentioned, rather than them being part of the costs passed on to customers and merchants.