I think Monero was a good test for privacity ideas that will be implement in the Lighting with time
Discussion
listen, I first used bitcoin in 2012. my first wallet was bitcoin-qt and my second wallet was multibit HD. I have been hearing this for years and years. bitcoin will implement all the wonderful things that alts have done and make them all obsolete. except it never happens. the only example I can think of is groestl being brave enough to try out segwit before bitcoin, and that's not really even a good example. what I have seen is the bitcoin developers have a terminal case of not-invented-here syndrome. bitcoin has a sidechain with permissionless validation and full smart contract capability RIGHT NOW and nobody will even talk about it because it's similar to ethereum, and we just can't have that. half life 3 will come out before any bitcoin developers give us anything that is as good as monero.
the L2 is here for this for do things that don't need be part of L1
This is just a narrative
There is no general technical reason that you *need* an L2 unless you are limiting yourself to old tech and need it to scale immediately
Even Bitcoin L1 has potential to scale over time. It all heavily depends on rate of adoption, consumer tech advances, and protocol scalability improvements. Think of increase in bandwidth and hard drive size in only a decade and decreasing cost.
If you still don't think so, here are only two examples of L1 tech that can easily scale *today*: MimbleWimble (LitecoinMWEB, Grin, Beam) and DAGs (Nano)