And even though Bitcoin can work when the receiver is offline, it still requires both parties to be online and verify the transaction to complete the sale (or whatever deal we made).
I don't know if this is the argument that franky is making, but paying with Bitcoin doesn't technically require funds of either party to be online (in a hot wallet). Sender can sign the TX offline, receiver can give a cold wallet address to the sender. Sender needs to broadcast it, receiver needs to verify it, but both don't need to be online at the same or otherwise coordinated.
Back in the day I was rolling my own payment processing and it was extremely simple, efficient, and safe - pre-generate a bunch of cold addresses and hand them out to buyers. None of this is feasible with LN and it seems to be pushing merchant adoption towards custodial options.