Going off chain is dangerous. Bitcoin's security and decentralization guarantees do not scale beyond the base layer, so you're always giving up one or the other, or both, when you want to extend bitcoin's functionality. Even though the lightning white paper came out in 2016, it took years of development and experimentation to get it to work, and work securely.
In fact, lightning channels were purposely kept small because no one knew when something would break and funds would be lost.
The white paper also goes through in detail many of the risks and drawbacks that people are bringing up as FUD today, and have for years, including technical and social risks.