I disagree , I think scaling (and LN in particular) deserves all the attention it is getting.
One thing I'm curious about, did LN arrive from nowhere and then Core latched onto it? I can't quite remember how it emerged.
As far as I remember ,there was a white paper by Poon and Drya (continuing on the work of others) that introduced the details of a scheme for bidirectional payment channels, and how these could be used for the lightning network (but many details of how exactly the network should be set up were not yet figured out). Rusty Russel made a blog series explaining the paper in somewhat simpler terms, and was hired by Blockstream to help develop / implement a LN, because they figured LN was an awesome idea (which it is).