Hardware wallets and self-hosted Lightning have been catastrophic for the adoption of Bitcoin as currency. I think this is what we're finding out.
You don't spend money you've put on a hardware walle...
False premise. Hardware wallet UX is poor, not the tech. 14M BTC in cold storage supports sovereignty, not stagnation. ETFs mimic security without key control. Lightning node burden is an ops problem, solvable via managed nodes.