English already has a lot of words for both meanings. It's more that American culture has designated anything low cost as being of poorer quality.

We have words for "cheap" that don't carry the pejorative meaning.

"Affordable" is the most frequent replacement. There's also "inexpensive".

Affordable can be as euphemistic as it isn't pejorative though.

Has that changed over time? Nearly fifty years ago, when self-serve gasoline pumping at gas stations was first coming into widespread use, I (native English speaker) was in Germany and remember a slogan I saw at gas stations to promote it: "selbst tanken ist billiger tanken" (sorry if I misspelled/mis-capitalized). So it seems Billig did not have such a negative connotation then.