I can't recall what 'Bitcoiner' it was, but Liquid was advertised as a scaling solution for Bitcoin, which is retarded because that's not the case at all. The point basically was that Bitcoin itself is slow and expensive, but Liquid fixes that problem. Conflict of interest it reeks of.
The narrative keeps changing..... Bitcoin's goal was to end middlemen services, and what are we doing? Yeah, introduce more of them.
Bitcoin was intended to remove the need for intermediaries, but not every transaction people make requires Bitcoin's security guarantees. Liquid just gives people a cheaper and faster option if they don't need (or don't want to pay for) Bitcoin's on-chain security.
In those cases, using a federated model like Liquid seems better than a single point of failure like a Bitcoin exchange.