Jokes aside, I haven't lost faith in a self-sovereign techno-utopia yet. Being able to transact offchain was critical for that, and we made it possible once we fixed transaction malleability in 2017.

Lightning will definitely not cut it at global scale, but I want to believe that it's just the "0 to 1" technology, and that some people will find incrementally smarter and more robust ways to transact offchain, with better tradeoffs.

Besides that, as you said custodians have been here since the beginning and will probably be a mainstay of Bitcoin forever. Not that I like it, but it is what it is.