> Personal opinion: I think the part you are missing here is that lots of transactions shouldn't be occurring on the base layer.

What you're really saying is that you don't think BTC should help banking the unbanked (because they often live in poor countries where their weekly salary is your cup of coffee).

> Why is it "laughable" for the lightning network to use BTC as a settlement layer?

It's laughable because people will just use another crypto, so they don't have to pay the +2 large and expensive BTC on-chain fees.