Fun fact: aluminum used to be more valuable than gold.

From here... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium

"As Wöhler's method could not yield great quantities of aluminium, the metal remained rare; its cost exceeded that of gold. [57]

...

[57] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#cite_note-Venetski-6...

Two things:

1. Things can be niche because there just aren't that many people who want them, rather than because you couldn't make them cheaply if there was demand. A good quality Videodisc player for example costs far more now than it did at the height of the format, because only weird retro collectors want one so there's no reason to mass produce them. Videodisc players are niche.

2. We're talking about literal space, it can actually fill up. Some orbits are either so low that everything de-orbits soon enough anyway and needs replacing, or so high that we'd never conceivably fill them, but in between are plenty of useful orbits that are finite, so filling them up with more crap doesn't make any sense even if you could do it for free.

It’s not so much that there’s not enough room up there, but rather if any odd piece of shit decides to disintegrate the debris field will make a large swath of orbit uninhabitable until the debris falls back to Earth.

So even if getting up there gets cheap the things we put up there will still need to be expensive.