That's off chain and should be nearly free

If only. It's not off chain when you open a channel, rebalance a channel, or close a channel. On-chain Fees need to be paid at every step of the way.

High BTC fees impede the Lightning Network from being a true scaling solution, an obvious fact that has been dismissed for many years by adherents of absurdly small block sizes.

It is nearly free.

If you want an actual transaction on the actual chain that can actually be spent then you need to pay the giant bitcoin transaction fee. Why would anyone put up with the extreme convoluted nonsense of the lightning network when they could use any other cryptocurrency and have almost no fees because they aren't constraining their block sizes to sell a second layer?

There is no technical reason to do this, it was purely a political propaganda based move.

Before you respond with "but disk" or "but network" or "but cpu" look at the actual bitcoin throughput (about 700KB every 10 minutes) and look at how much hard drive space you can buy for the cost of one transaction. Then realize that individuals don't even need to sync with the chain to use cryptocurrencies. This is a well worn road.