A lot to address, but I basically agree with everything you are saying here.

Interestingly enough I was just listening Bitcoin Takeover podcast today that had Jameson Lopp as a guest and he was pretty much saying how he is much more in favor of increasing the blocksize now since tech has progressed since the creation of Bitcoin (been hearing a lot of maxis with the same sentiment lately). He was saying how the true bottleneck is probably internet upload bandwidth and we should base it around that. Something I've also thought would be reasonable if Bitcoin maxis still wanted to be conservative about it.

Although Bitcoiners love to point to Lightning as a scaling solution, it doesn't really scale without a major blocksize increase. But ultimately I think there are better solutions out there than lightning like Drivechains or some kind of Rollup. BTC needs to activate a few opcodes for them to fully function though.

And vulnerable custodial solutions like ecash are non-starters as a replacement for what was supposed to be p2p digital cash that gets rid of intermediaries. Any public mint runner is also a clear and easy target for money transmitter laws. It's cool in some ways, but it isn't playing the same game.