The purchaser paid that fee to the protocol (miner + burn), not the seller, to have their transaction processed before others in the mempool and settle the trade in < ~30 sec. They could have set a smaller fee ($10-100) and gone for lunch, and their transaction would have been accepted within an hour or two.
This is most likely a UX issue. Users aren’t aware they can set normal fees even during congested periods.
So it's more like me announcing that, if everyone in line lets me cut to the front, I will burn a $100 bill and enrich them all slightly through deflation. I wonder if any transactions ever just never get confirmed because they never pay enough gas fee to not be pre-empted?
The burn is one part (and in many cases the majority of the transaction fee) but there is also an optional tip directed to miners which may incentivize them to include your transaction first.
Transactions that are below the market fee will just sit in mempool waiting for a miner to pick it up. Eventually these 'stuck' transactions will be pruned by nodes to free up room for more rewarding transactions.
I recently wrote a thread on how UI design changes could likely mitigate most of the overpaying that the Vice article is reporting on.[1]
This is most likely a UX issue. Users aren’t aware they can set normal fees even during congested periods.