This is a really important point to make.

The question is whether the slightly shaky foundation of lightning, as current- LN penalty- will support enough further refinement that it can be used into the future. This shakiness has made the engineering workload needed to reach safe usability, huge. And there are still big holes in it from the point of view of robustness.

But Calle is dead right that LN sets the bar way higher in decentralization, and we should only really be looking for alternatives that have that same property.