If ships are free, losing ships is meaningless.
If ships are too expensive, people don’t risk flying those ships.
Clearly, ships need to be at a balanced point in between ‘too cheap’ and ‘too expensive’.
You cannot simply argue for ‘cheaper ships is better’ without it breaking the game when prices become too cheap. For example, the introduction of Rorquals put so many minerals on the market in the following years, that capital prices became ridiculously low due to overabundance that CCP even had to introduce the unpopular Scarcity phase to deal with that and make the economy in EVE matter again.
You seem to have grown accustomed to the pre-scarcity prices and think that is how the norm should be. It is not what CCP thinks the norm should be for ship prices.