Originally, you could transfer large amounts of BTC with no fees. Just like
this transaction, which transferred 194,993 BTC (now worth almost a billion dollars)
for free. Even then, including your fee would have given miners an incentive to include your transaction first, but your transaction would still have been included in a block.
But if transactions were free forever, you could imagine that there would be spam on the network. An attacker could send an unlimited number of free transactions and fill the block space to such an extent that it's a terrible burden on full nodes and people no longer run the blockchain.
So satoshi made a limit to the size of blocks as a device against spam. That means that an attacker can only send a certain amount of transactions before he fills the blocks, and then the attacker (as well as ordinary users, unfortunately) has to pay fees to include each transaction in a block until it becomes far too expensive to spam and they give up.
There are suggestions of raising this limit because arguably the blocks are becoming full by ordinary means, but some disagree with raising it.
Still, the transaction fees are not as high as you think. Your wallet is
suggesting too high a fee, and a decent wallet will let you change it.