Give the man a break: he was a visionary but he could not predict the future exactly, and in hindsight, something that takes 10mn to confirm a transaction was likely never going to be used as a currency, at least not until layer 2 tech (lightning) delivers.
payments = replacing bank wires and ACH payments, not buying coffee
He/she/they meant bitcoin is a bearer instrument like gold and not something that has to be redeemed. It doesn't represent debt the way a federal reserve note (a.k.a. a dollar) does.
Most of the white paper could have been boiled down to this:
Bitcoin is a non-sovereign, hard-capped supply, global, immutable, decentralized digital store of value. Itβs an insurance policy against monetary and fiscal policy irresponsibility from central banks and governments globally.β@Travis_Kling
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution"
"Payments" appears in literally sentence #1.