We can walk and chew gum at the same time, building out great lightning tooling for both humans and machine to machine payments. They're not mutually exclusive. I think it's also an opportunity to get a bitcoin foot in the door of a bunch of companies/people who otherwise wouldn't be interested, but are currently facing monetization problems that bitcoin uniquely solves.

Credit based API keys don't work for a couple reasons, big ones being chargebacks and requiring you to maintain a persistent identity for the user instead of just being able to give them the service in receipt for money.

E.g. every single company trying to add AI into their product is facing this exact problem that they can't monetize it so are either having you BYO api key, using stripe exclusively, or just otherwise limiting access to people with credit cards. Entirely possible they end up just going the way of the rest of the internet but would prefer they use bitcoin and think there's a good case for using lightning (as it exists today with good sender side privacy) to allow wider access to AI