> If we as consumers are voting with our wallets, in most cases we're the ones who have accepted the new norm as acceptable in the spirit of chasing ever lower fares.

I think that's not true either; the ability to readily compare fares has led to opacity in pricing by moving a growing and shifting (and inconsistent among carriers) set of services out of the base ticket price into separately charged services.

Interpreting market behavior as revealed preference assumes all the classical ideal market situations, including perfect information, which is particularly silly when the supposed revealed preference is for a status quo with deliberate selective opacity of key information.