The fees make Bitcoin inaccessible to vast numbers of people, arguably the ones who need it most. Even at $6 a transaction, that’s a days wage in some parts of the world. Lightning could work, but then the argument of self-hosted freedom is out of the window, because even less people are running or can even afford to open their own channels. Almost no one runs a node. I would guess that the 19,000 or so accessible nodes are run by less than 10,000 people. It’s a tiny minority, and this won’t change because people don’t care as much about this side of things as they do about getting rich. The numbers speak for themselves. The issue is see approaching is that proxies for interaction introduce the same barriers that the system set out to escape. People can censor, deplatform and charge whatever fees they want via the proxies.

If you can't afford on-chain, you can use custodial lightning, preferably ecash, until you improve your economic position and the security of self custody is worthwhile your increased savings. Eventually on-chain wouldn't even have capacity to on-board people to lightning, but I'd fancy some upgrades to lightning's protocol allowing channels to be opened natively on lightning or to Bitcoin itself, like covenants. If you don't have savings to lose, Wallet of Satoshi works just fine.