If you read the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network) it highlights it quite well under "commitment transactions."

It takes something that is, in human terms, relatively simple and makes it so convoluted that it's hard to even follow.

Wikipedia is often notoriously convoluted for technical topics though.

I read the Lightning paper and found it simple enough to understand (conceptually at least) how the channels are opened, updated, closed, and penalized. Of course the actual implementation is a more complicated and nuanced than what the paper covers.

Since you read the Lighting whitepaper, you know that an uncongested base-layer is assumed. The paper suggests something like 133MB blocks at scale.

That was a conservative assumption at a multiple of the entire worldwide financial transaction volume... utilizing old technology.

The same volume without lightning would require blocks that were terabytes, which is obviously unworkable at the current state of technology.

I disagree that the LN paper made conservative assumptions.

A "black swan" event like a major lightning hub going down may force more channel closings than the network (as currently implemented) has time to process before time-out.

The LN simply does not work if the base layer is congested.