You can't have it both ways. Many Bitcoiners remind me of the goldbugs I used to be part of....they envisioned a world in which people would bring gold coins to the grocery store to buy bread....when you pressed them on how would this actually work, then never had good answers. (ie. Will cashiers be able assay gold? Will they be able to make change for a 1 oz coin....how with silver? or more gold or both? What if you only want gold?)

My point is, the fantasy of many bitcoiners of grandma running her LND node and enticing her local pharmacy to accept bitcoin is the dream of young unrealistic autistics.

If bitcoin winds up becoming just another rehypothecated manipulated financial instrument, then it was a failure from the beginning.

Personally, I see Bitcoin very much like the Internet itself. Certainly the "promise of the internet" has yielded very mixed results. As someone who was very active in 1990s early internet, the dream of the cyberpunk is both dead yet strangely still alive.

98% of internet use is controlled by a handful of companies (we've just swapped NBC, CBS, ABC for Meta, Google, X, etc) - yet you can still use it in the way the original dream presented it. You can host your own websites and communicate securely, its just that you have to be willing to jump thru the hoops to achieve that.

Same will be case with Bitcoin.