Bitcoin's purpose was to eliminate 3rd party middlemen and IOU based fractional reserve banking, Yet, now they want to reintroduce both.
Bullshit. In the traditional sense of third parties and IOUs, there is always one party that can take away your control of the asset in question. This is not the case with LN, because it is decentralized. There will be things like LN hubs for sure, which people will argue that are centralized, but they only serve for better routing purposes.
'On-chain scaling is the most secure thing one could do (here you have the biggest hardware + energy investors = miners behind) and we need this first or at least parallel to all the other triggy scalings on top. '
Actually, it is exactly the opposite. Changes which provide on-chain scaling are the most insecure, as you can break the protocol. If you break some 2nd layer, the main protocol will remain functional.