TLDR: ETH gas prices will improve whenever the sharding chain is fully live, which is in the beginning stages of development - Live sharding v.1 is estimated to come out sometime this year.
The average Ethereum gas fees (in Gwei) has been steadily increasing as of late, as you can see from this chart pulled from etherscan.io.
The fee increase is due in large to the increased popularity of Ethereum. As more traffic clogs the Ethereum DeFi mainnet, the demand falls on the shoulders of the miners who process the transactions. To deal with the 'bottleneck' demand, miners charge more in gas to complete transactions.
Ethereum2.0 aims to solve this issue by making the ecosystem 'more scalable' via their three-step upgrade plan, which introduces the 'beacon chain', 'shard chains', and 'the docking' - you can read more about this here. ETH2.0 launched the beacon chain in early December. It is considered sort of a ETH1.5 as it introduces proof of stake and helps us transition to ETH2.0, where sharding will expand the ETH network to 64 blockchains. SharDing - its a hard D.
Sharding will expand the ETH network to 64 blockchains, which will vastly improve that bottleneck problem, but when will it release? Well, the sharding chain for ETH2.0 is still in R&D, but a simple answer is sometime this year. A more accurate answer is a little more complex as it takes a true insider to answer that question.
Luckily, the dev teams of ETH2 are very open to the public about their progress. Recently they held a workshop meeting to discuss the current state (Feb. 2, 2021) of sharding and the ETH1 + ETH2 merger, posted below. Most of the video is pretty technical and beyond the scope of this article, however early on in the meeting a key dev, Danny, stated that the prototypes of sharding and the beacon chain merger are "on the d side" of R&D... the hard D side. SO development is underway. Danny also stated that they will be bringing on more engineers to help with the development.
"When the first shard chains are shipped they will just provide extra data to the network. They won’t handle transactions or smart contracts. But they’ll still offer incredible improvements to transactions per second when combined with rollups." (link) - this should improve gas fees, as it will improve transaction bottlenecking.
