One can say: maybe he realized that his 2008 scaling solution was going to "centralize" is system, so he simply put in something that would push people to invent an off-chain way of using it. In other words, he put in this limit because he understood that block chain tech doesn't scale, contrary to his 2008 explanation, and considered that people should invent something that solves it in another way. In other words, he did this to push people to invent the LN.
But that doesn't hold water either. Given that he didn't know whether something like the LN could even be invented, and given that he didn't know when it would be invented, and what would have been its needs, crippling the only solution you have, of which you've explained how it would scale, would have been extremely dangerous. If the LN would only have been invented in 2025, bitcoin would have been dead already by the time it could have been invented. That's akin to jumping out of an air plane, and hoping you'll invent a parachute while falling.
Hal Finney predicted "more or less" LN back in the day:
Actually there is a very good reason for Bitcoin-backed banks to exist, issuing their own digital cash currency, redeemable for bitcoins. Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient. Likewise, the time needed for Bitcoin transactions to finalize will be impractical for medium to large value purchases.
Bitcoin backed banks will solve these problems. They can work like banks did before nationalization of currency. Different banks can have different policies, some more aggressive, some more conservative. Some would be fractional reserve while others may be 100% Bitcoin backed. Interest rates may vary. Cash from some banks may trade at a discount to that from others.
George Selgin has worked out the theory of competitive free banking in detail, and he argues that such a system would be stable, inflation resistant and self-regulating.
I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the "high-powered money" that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash. Most Bitcoin transactions will occur between banks, to settle net transfers. Bitcoin transactions by private individuals will be as rare as... well, as Bitcoin based purchases are today.
But LN is much better than what he envisioned.
And this post is very old, but they already knew it wouldn't scale on-chain. People buying coffees on-chain all over the world fast and cheap was always delusional, but LN can save the day.
Satoshi also predicted people going against blocksize increases:
Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale.
Bitcoin and BitDNS can be used separately. Users shouldn't have to download all of both to use one or the other. BitDNS users may not want to download everything the next several unrelated networks decide to pile in either.
The networks need to have separate fates. BitDNS users might be completely liberal about adding any large data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, while Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices.
I don't believe in conspiracy theories, everyone was trying to do what was seen as best at the time. Satoshi didn't predict big centralization in mining, so we can't have huge blocksizes, it will need to scale off-chain. LN is the best technology out there to scale a coin worldwide. If it fails, we can always go back to layer 0 and still have decentralized enough network and use it as a store of value only (yes, Bitcoin IS decentralized, when was the last time you saw a miner selecting a transaction he didn't like and blocking it? because that is what decentralization is, being able to donate to Wikileaks freely, and same goes for the protocol, no one can change it in a centralized fashion; sure the mining could be better, but the power distribution is spread across different parties enough to be called decentralized, as for the initial specs of Bitcoin (that is, 21 million limit coin, the blocksize, and so on).. well, it had to start somewhere, I don't know what you suggest there.