The micropayment markets have been gone for awhile. Now the markets in the moderate ranges are being effected....many (almost all) of the early adopters were the moderate ranged markets ---> e-stuff, coffee shops, vape clubs....this is going to have a longer lasting effect I believe....confidence in the platform is waning. Who's going to invest in a merchant gateway that's unpredictably fickle and subject to becoming obsolete? I don't know, I'm beginning to think the bitcoin cash syndicate was right all along.
Maybe Bitcoin was never ideal for micropayments from a design perspective. They worked initially because there wasn't much demand for transaction confirmations (not many people used the network). Now that there is so much demand, we need off-chain solutions like the Lightning Network, which don't compromise the trustless model. LN's model may be different and off-chain, but it is trustless and fully compatible with Bitcoin. That's good enough for me.