Regarding the opinion of Base protocol head Jesse Pollak that "Ethereum and L2 are not in a zero-sum competition," Abstract Chain contributor cygaar stated on X: "This may be a somewhat controversial viewpoint, but I truly believe that L2 will compete with Ethereum L1 in the short term.
Many workloads that once existed on L1 (NFTs, transactions, DeFi, games) have already migrated to L2, resulting in a decrease in fees generated/destroyed on L1 over the past few years.
However, the reason I say 'short term' is that I believe L2 is the only way for the Ethereum ecosystem and ETH assets to compete with a large number of new L1s.
One of Ethereum's greatest features is its emphasis on decentralization. Unfortunately, most users do not care about decentralization until it's too late. L2 provides Ethereum with a way to maintain a highly decentralized platform while still supporting fast and cheap transactions that can compete with alt-L1s.
What Jesse is saying here is that, in the long run, he hopes L2 will be able to serve so much traffic that the fees generated by Ethereum at present will exceed the fees generated before L2 emerged. I tend to believe this is true.
In summary, I think it's fair to acknowledge that L2 will indeed reduce the value accumulation of L1 in the short term. However, I believe that in the long run, L2 is beneficial for Ethereum and will be the way for Ethereum to defeat many emerging L1s.

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