Saw this comment too late, sorry. Yes, that's overhead for the operator of the service. But this is not what I was referring to, nor the OP to which I answered. He made the false assumption that the gas fee moves up or down because node operators in the network reflect the costs to settle a transaction in the price, if the costs to them goes up then, he assumed, gas fees go up. This is not how it works. Node operators don't have a mechanism to reflect the costs to settle a transaction in the gas fee. Those two prices are allowed to float independently, then there are some mechanisms coded into the protocol that tend to produce equilibriums so that there is never too much disparity and the network remains profitable.

> Duplicating a painting has a huge overhead.

Duplicates don't sell. This is very similar in crypto - if you duplicate an existing blockchain, its block space doesn't sell. Art - and blockchains - sell because they are original, liquid, come with durable social proof, and have resale prospects and/or utility (real or perceived).

> Thousands of computers are doing the same thing, repeating the same calculations and therefore not improving capacity in any way.

I think I get what you're saying - if a blockchain were able to run on a single computer, then gas would be very cheap because each calculation would only need to be run once.

Current blockchain protocols, of course, do not work like that. So if I might try to paraphrase your argument about overhead, it boils down to "if blockchains did not work the way they do, then gas costs would be cheaper." Which I can't really argue with.