The main reason altcoins transfer faster and cheaper is two-fold: First, their networks are dead, and so their blocks (or their equivalent system) are empty. It's easy to get included in a block when no one wants to use your coin. Secondly, they are far less secure than bitcoin. Even the "top" bitcoin forks take several days to achieve the same level of security as bitcoin achieves in an hour, and the minor coins can take months or even years before they are as secure. This is reflected in the fact that a number of "top" altcoins have been successfully 51% attacked.

Yeah, it's not the miner's fault that fees are high. Rather it is all the exchanges and services which charge ridiculous withdrawal fees, and all the users using web wallets which dictate ridiculous fees or automatic fee algorithms without looking at the mempool themselves.

Now, I'm not saying Lightning is the solution to all scaling issues, but I also don't think it's quite as black and white as you are making it out to be. Lightning is still in its infancy - it is not surprising that many channels are short lived. As people become more familiar and more confident with the technology, then they will be happier funding their channels with more bitcoin and therefore leaving them open for longer. If the opening and closing of Lightning channels starts filling the mempool, then fees will go up, and users will be incentivized to keep their channels open for more than 3 months. Lots of users still use custodial solutions to store their bitcoin, be that on web wallets or exchanges, and so a single Lightning channel opened by one of these services has the potential to serve thousands of users.