Just wondering if you can deploy smart contacts on something other than ETH?

I started learning smart contracts and was blow away by the cost to deploy. I was under the impression that it would be very cheap to deploy a smart contract.

Looks like it was dirt cheap a while back.

So if the cost of deployment of a smart contract is all about the market price of what is mined, why doesn't someone come up with a direct competitor to ETH?

I did look into mining before and you can pick what you want to mine, so what's to stop some company from creating a new ETH competitor and mining it themselves in order to be able to reduce the costs?