peter todd identified two types of scaling solutions. they are payment channel based and UTXO sharing. you already figured out what's wrong with the payment channel approach. it's never going to materialize into something that the end user will do without a custodian, unless they are a masochist.
the UTXO sharing solutions are things like drivechains, rollups, or ark. it's not possible to finish them without consensus changes. even on ethereum where every consensus requirement is already met, they are still not totally finished with creating their rollups. but what has been done today is already very popular. it feels exactly the same as using L1.