I think the community is just having a hard time catching up with the fundamental shift between what lightning was sold to us as and what it has successfully become.
Originally, people thought it was going to be the cypherpunk individual with a raspberry pi and a node way to scale Bitcoin. And what he says in just the first few minutes is a perfect bullet point list of why that is a complete and total failure.
But I think lightning is here to stay. I just think that people using it are going to be different than what the original version was.
Ironically, lightning is fulfilling the vision of what liquid was originally marketed as, at least to a certain extent. Liquid was originally built to be the way for large holder's like exchanges to be able to send Bitcoin back and forth with as little friction as possible.
This has basically become what lightning is good for. If I send Bitcoin to Kraken, I send it over for lightning for several reasons.
And I think the large, well-run nodes are actually worth something while it's like Aqua, Bull Bitcoin, and Wallet of Satoshi i'll use lightning to complete payments but in the background are using Bitcoin and Liquid or Spark.
The other day I paid for something in person at a shop with lightning and like every lightning transaction now it went perfectly.
Obviously, there are many trade-offs with some of these contraptions that people are building to make Bitcoin more usable with less pressure on chain. Privacy being perhaps the biggest question mark in some of these setups.
But I think all of this kind of development has value and can be improved, and I don't think lightning is going anywhere. I just think the use case is changing from something that was a total failure to something that actually is quite successful.