It's not vaporware. We use it all day long. Just because it's not popular doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's a marketing problem. Many, many Bitcoiners haven't heard of Lightning. It's wild.
Discussion
With the onchain limitation of transactional throughput, it would take almost 100 years for everyone to onboard to lightning and open 1 channel. lightning also has incentives that trend towards centralization. I am literally in the 1% of bitcoiners who runs their own node and uses lightning in a self sovereign way. People just use a differnt coin rather than using lightning because the tech learning curve and because managing channels and liquidity is a massive pain in the ass. no normie will ever do it. Add this to the fact that lightning right now is being handicapped by high onchain fees and we have a solution that was sold as a miracle and performs as a turd
it performs nicely. not everyone needs or can run a node. we now have about 10,000 nodes which could be turned off today and the network would just be better off. only well-managed nodes make sense, others are a liability. running a node is not and probably never will be consumer tech; most people need it as a service, like phoenix, without knowing details of how it's being managed.