The hodlers are hoping for a doomsday scenario and hyperinflation, as a driver for the ultimate mass adoption. I see this as quite plausible, but far from certain.

As a currency, BTC is too slow and not compelling. Lightning is way to complex, over-engineered by committee, does not work when the recipient is offline, I doubt it will gain much more mass adoption than PGP email signatures from the 1990s.

The valid use cases for layer 2 are micropayments, lack of chargebacks and lack of benevolent payment processors that decide which transactions are appropriate. But Lightning as a tech just does not cut it IMO.