After going back and forth and realizing how easy it is to get lost, this is what I think are the core principles to consider:
We cannot guarantee some specific state expansion just by altering gas costs. For one, we do not know the price-elasticity of demand for state creation. We can easily imagine users not being particularly sensitive to the increased state gas costs, continuing to purchase state relative to other resources similar to present usage patterns. That means two things:
- State growth is not guaranteed to be contained by the increase in its gas cost, but it will help. We should not be surprised by an increase in state growth, even if we scale gas costs linearly with the increase in the gas limit. It is also not impossible that state growth falls.
- We may under equilibrium see well over 50% of all consumed gas being spent on state, which obviously is an impediment to scaling under the current one-dimensional fee market.
To address this in a fully satisfying manner, we need a multidimensional fee market, expanding on something like EIP-7999. However, EIP-8011 would also be very useful in the short-term.