I love the idea that a fundamental economic problem (high demand) can be met with another half-baked technological solution. It's crypto comedy gold. Hint: speed up the timeline for the deployment of ETH2 / Proof of Stake if you want to lower gas fees - a.k.a. increase capacity beyond 10k transactions a day.
Sharding is a very simple to understand concept and it's used in database systems today. Effectively, Ethereum's long-term data will become split across 4 partitions (which function as one chain). A validator would not be required to validate data on all 4 shards, they could validate across just one.
Ethereum's execution will continue to be serialized while the data layer is parallelized.
This allows the chain data to grow without excessive hardware requirements.
sharding is a pipe dream. literally no different to just throwing your hands up, spinning up few more parallel ethereum networks and proclaiming you've solved a scalability problem.
