Will ETH always require 32 ETH to be a validator?

So as the merge has come and gone smoothly. It leaves me with one question really, will us small guys ever be able to move off an exchange and stake from a wallet?

If I had to take a wild guess, I would say around 50% of this subreddit has a portfolio of somewhere between $5-$10k in various coins in the crypto space. And I think that’s being generous.

As it stands as the price of around $1500 to make rounding easier as of writing. You would need around $50k of investments in crypto alone if you wanted to stake your ETH off an exchange. That’s not realistic for 90% of this subreddit I would say.

ETH becoming POS has moved it closer to centralization , which I know all oppose. Crypto was meant to be decentralized and at least POW provides that with anyone being able to mine a token fairly easy.

So this leads to couple important questions:

Will ETH always require 32 coins to be a self validator?

Or will there be updates in the future that will reduce the cost to a couple coins to be a validator.

Why exactly do we need 32 to begin with?