The whole mining network are middlemen who charge middleman fees, so you’re pretty much stuck with that, short of deciding to be a miner.
And the more currencies are in common use that aren’t locked in essentially exclusive jurisdictional domains, the more demand merchants and consumers will have for middlemen that make dealing with multiple of them and converting them at need as close to frictionless as possible. Sure, partisans of one crypto or another will be happy to transact directly in that crypto without an abstraction layer over multiple currencies, but they will be the exception, not the norm.
Crypto idealists may each see their favored coin as the way to get beyond traditional middlemen, but in reality each coin that reaches nontrivial use actually increases the demand for middlemen.
