Monero scales for the time being onchain with dynamic blocksizes. With its next upgrade it can have a LN built on top of it with mentioned downsides (and upsides).

Cake and Stack make it extremely easy to manage Monero and other coins if you desire. They come with Tor integration out of the box which means even if people do not run their own nodes they get good network anonymity.

Why does it need to beat Bitcoin. That's maxi philosophy. Best tool for the job. Just use BTC as your store of value. With atomic swaps you can move In and out as you need it. My personal recommendation is to buy any BTC via non KYC Monero.