See, there's another narrative you've bought. "Base layer." The title of the whitepaper was "peer to peer electronic cash". There's no reason you need layers upon layers to achieve that. It's pretty simple what you need actually. The only thing that almost every single cryptocurrency lacks to be able to do everything you need for peer to peer electronic cash is to be able to get the same security guarantees bitcoin provides while retaining absolutely no historical data, and in a way where amounts, recipients and senders are only known to the parties involved.
I say "almost" because Tom Elvis Judasor's mimblewimble paper specified a protocol to do exactly that. The only thing is, you can't do timelocks, multisig, and there's a privacy shortcoming I'll get into of you're curious. But with it, you don't even need a block size, you can scale to global commerce limited only by the speed of light through the global network. Andrew Poelstra's mimblewimble improvements give you the multisig and stuff, still have the privacy shortcoming, but some historical data has to be stored forever. Significantly less than bitcoin and Monero, but still, some. It's the closest thing to space money ever made. That privacy shortcoming is probably the only reason that MW is not the protocol for Monero today. It was put in as a BIP, and rejected. Technically, if you go look at it, it is better than current bitcoin in every conceivable way. But it was too big of a change. You can't improve bitcoin.
Lightning isn't bitcoin. Lightning is it's own network, a side chain except it isn't a chain. That's fine, if it does what bitcoin can't do but still inherits the strengths of bitcoin without severe trade offs. But the network graph for lightning are such that it is not a viable scaling solution. A viable privacy solution, maybe, but it can't scale, because the amount you need locked in channels scales exponentially with the amount of commerce taking place on it. It can scale in a centralized way, where everyone just uses big liquidity providers as payment processors, and that's exactly what's happening.
