Expect at least a year before you start seeing lower gas. The merge won’t reduce gas fees but it’s the first step in doing so.

A decent number of people were expecting gas fees to quickly and suddenly decrease right after the merge, but that is far from the truth.

Technically, moving to PoS does register a very tiny decrease in gas fees, but that change is basically negligible.
The only thing that changes for now is energy consumption which will see a huge 99.9% decrease.

If you’re waiting for gas fees to become low, you’re going to have to wait at least a year from now until sharding gets implemented.

Even then, Ethereum itself won’t be cheap and never will if devs stick to the current roadmap.
What Sharding will do is facilitate a groundwork for EVM compatible L2s to help scale Ethereum.
And with enough time and upgrades down the line, L2s will basically become a part of Ethereum itself. They’ll be indistinguishable.

Implementing scalability into the Ethereum chain itself would have taken a lot more time, energy, and resources.
Meanwhile, L2s have been doing this for a while and they have the facilities, flexibility, and infrastructure to keep developing better ways to scale Ethereum.

Ethereum would need to a lot more time to test out scalability since a ton of private funds are on the line. Meanwhile, an L2 like Polygon for example has been doing this for years and they even have the groundwork for it. They have an entire data availability scaling solution which is the entire focus of sharding in the first place.

Sharding is officially slated for mid 2023 but considering that mishaps and extra testing might be happening especially after the delays that we experienced with the merge, I’m expecting sharding to get rolled out at least end of 2023

But that’s okay because current L2s are already doing a great job honestly but sharding will be the nail in the coffin for any criticism regarding Ethereum and I’m here to see all of that unroll.