lightning is broke. it has many flaws. even el salvador dropped it after 3 months of trying it. it suffers a liquidity issue. the more popular it gets the more it fails(liquidity bottlenecks)

lightning is not the saviour.
it has a liquidity issue. the success rate of moving the daily volume of bitcoin value transactions just wont work on lightning. lightning is only a niche for small crap like sub $50 value. it cannot handle everyone moving a monthly wage
let alone the daily movements bitcoin handles

bitcoin is fine. it can lock value up
the issue is the subnetworks that are over promised, under delivered and have many flaws and disfunctions

im saying subnetwork bridges that are being promoted as the savour are the flaw

lightning is not a "bitcoin" thing. its a separate network that uses a different unit of measure(medium of exchange)
the method of processing payments is different and it can be used with multiple currencies or no currency at all (fraction reserve, false balance etc) thus its not a bitcoin only network (hense why its called a bridge)

there will be more effective sidechains/subnetworks.. some will be solo functional to only one mainnet some will be bridges to multiple, and they will be developed in the future with stronger security, better monetary policy. but lightning is not the saviour

you are too enamoured by the publicity without understanding the functionality of lightning, you are not looking at its limitations and only reading the broken promises and hype of crap scripts of possibility.
but when you run scenarios you soon learn its not as expected/promised.. unless you are a penny mover only wanting to move crappy small amounts useless to real world product purchases

lightning is not for everyone. its a small niche usecase with only 100% successful payments of small value like <$50

the congestion this month is not actually meme jpegs nor brc json crap
its just standard transactions paying too much done via pools recycling rewards as fees which recycle fees as rewards. meaning little to no costs on average. but effect is pushing up the average fee everyone else pays

the amount of meme jpeg junk has dropped to near zero
the amount of brc json junk is not even half of transactions

there is a few other things happening aswell..
there is a counter attack to break ordinal count
this is where they create a zero btc value utxo then add in junk ordinals. to then cause a miss count because there is no sats in the output. thus breaking ordinals proposition

just grabbing the latest block and looking at the first transaction the one with the highest fee
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/97268b40be559a05e8d328743c883408a63265f4da89262f15533f66230d4ed3
people are paying stupid amounts to attack ordinals. but all its doing is causing more fee mania

its spam fighting more spam causing more fee's

It got me pity on those still having huge asset with centralized exchanges now that things were going hard even for the exchanges considering how some of them are going bankrupt, everything Binance is doing is in consideration of it own efforts to maintain it's business running and not for the investors having their asset with them, everything will soon die down and by then, we will know the true identity of them all and see where the Ordinals will ended with it's story.

I mean — of course? These exchanges are businesses, and 99% of them operate solely mostly for the money. Let's not kid ourselves with the "for the crypto community" or whatever B.S. tagline these exchange founders fabricate.

I understand every of your point here, there are many things to be unveiled later than we are seeing currently with this present challenge with ordinals and transaction fee, but come to think of it this way when such experience occur in 2017 when the bitcoin fee rises as well, also we must put into the consideration that Lightning Network was introduced as a solution to the then current challenges with the bitcoin network as well, just that in this case, it's all about ordinals, but just in conclusion i see to your point that we the legitimate user of bitcoin shouldn't be the ones to shift ground for NFT by moving to layer two at our own expense while they take over the blockchain layer 1 in doing what can be regrettable for the entire bitcoin network later in life.

https://twitter.com/super_testnet/status/1654212346171064328
https://twitter.com/super_testnet/status/1654240508414246914
https://github.com/supertestnet/breaker-of-jpegs

the new scheme proposed to break ordinals. ends up using 3 tx to set up each 'miscount' and costs 10ksat in fee's thus is part of the fee mania.

again to note.
ordinals were broke from the start they are not real NFT or real value units with real justified proof of transfer. this counter attack may cause a miscount. but also causes more fee mania in doing so. thus overall not really solving a problem but instead causing more problems due to the fees