I mean, it’s more of an economic question then an engineering one, if we’re assuming ahead of time that it’s possible. If we could build an Earth space elevator for the volumetric price of water, you bet we’d be sending one up regardless of how cheap SpaceX launches are.

That’s probably never going to happen, but energy prices and expected investment returns could all change quite a lot in the indefinite future, and a space elevator with regenerative breaking is always going to use less energy than anything else.

Especially long term when we actually start gathering raw materials in space. We’ll eventually only need to send people , and complex things like microprocessors into space, and the rest can just be made up there.

Actually, microprocessors would be easier to make in a natural hard vacuum, as would things like magnesium or solar cells. In the long term I’d expect the limiting factors will be elements, and general demand to send things to inhospitable places in the first place. Maybe energy if fusion turns out to be way harder than we expected, and we still want to hang out on Pluto or Titan.