How did you not realize that one can run/evaluate code without actually broadcasting it? All you need is access to a node (plenty of public ones) and you can "simulate" any transaction(code) you would like.
In any case, for actual usage it should surprise nobody why everyone conflates Ethereum with money. No, your L2 chain does not qualify as an official solution.
It's absolutely representive of how it looks in deployment. You can test transactions EXACTLY how they would happen on mainnet.
I don't get your second point.
I would argue the exact opposite. A website will be deployed to different versions of different browsers on different operating systems. A smart contract will exist on a single distributed computer. It sounds like the actual problem is people treating smart contract development as cavalierly as web app development