I feel like this is a very one dimensional understanding of what lightning is becomming. It certainly did not turn out to be something that the average user could easily do in a sovereign way. In that regard, it's really a failure. It's a wonderful protocol for people who can extend the amount of effort necessary to run a node. And though that's hard for most end users, the service providers and banks themselves will certainly be running lightning nodes to send money back and forth to each other.

And things like custodial lightning nodes and single issuer mints are not going to bring us back to sovereignty.. but things like fedimints or federated models like liquid or wallets like Aqua are emerging and showing us that there will be ways to make trade-offs with second-layer solutions that do still retain distribution in their models.

All of those current distributed implementations interact with lightning. In the end, the solutions are coming.