I say 'cheap' in the sense that the hardware is not designed/have "engineered lifespans" to actually stay functional for long periods of time in space. As long as they go up, stay on for a few months and don't care that much about cosmic rays flipping bits to make 1+1=3, its good enough.
There's definitely a changing attitude towards what can be launched into space. The "cheap" satellites are not going to necessarily achieve the extreme performance needed for some missions, but by being more commercial, there's a new wave of missions that target specific, market-driven use-cases, and they don't all need the latest/greatest/fanciest tech.
Additionally, the orbit you fly in affects this conversation a lot. For Low Earth Orbit <1000 km, I'm confident that the market is going to be dominated by commodity hardware, except for flagship missions perhaps.
Higher altitudes require greater reliability due to radiation and are just more expensive orbits to get to. So I think it's going to take a little longer. Having said that, there are a bunch of companies tackling the higher orbits, like SpaceX with Starlink [3], and even YC alum Astranis [4] in GEO.
The way I like to think of it is that the space sector is maturing from a craft to a profession, and with that, commoditization offers a clear path towards scalability.
[2] https://www.planet.com/company/approach
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellat...
I kinda draw the analogy of how the Raspberry Pi went from being a learning tool, to something that hackers/makers saw as an opportunity to innovate on. CubeSats went through a similar transition.
The work that then led to commercial activities came from a lot of different people have similar ideas about how commoditization can help to reduce costs and allow for riskier projects.
There's actually a strong bias in the media that doesn't reflect the diversity of projects, missions, and technologies on the market at the moment. The idea of using a platform like CubeSats to open up the space sector is a lot more widespread than I think more people are aware of.
This has also led to a lot more university level science projects too. And the increased economies of scale for cubesat components have driven priced down low enough that there are high school classes launching cubesats.