What does immediate settlement mean to you? is it when someone sends you bitcoin or you send it to another person and the balance changes immediately? Is that immediate settlement? Or are you talking about exchanges to fiat, where a payment processor converts a received amount according to current market rates? If it is, how is it different from other cryptocurrencies? Bitcoin has an average block time of 10 mins, so the balance update you see immediately isn't confirmed yet in the blockchain. The generally accepted transaction finality is 6 blocks.

You mentioned international transactions. I haven't experimented with too many altcoins, but those I did try don't have issues with international transactions either. Crypto, not just bitcoin, doesn't know and need geographical restrictions. It's the same thing with direct transfers. They all move from Wallet A to wallet B if you want them to. 

Bitcoin's mining fees have gone up significantly following the introduction of Ordinals. But that doesn't change the quality of what Bitcoin is. Ethereum's problems lie elsewhere. For example, centralization and the fact that transactions can be reversed if Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation believe it's in their best interest to do that.

'Altcoin' is already a compound word made up of the words 'alternative' and 'coin'. Because of that, we don't say that an altcoin is an 'alternative altcoin'. 'Altcoin' is self-explanatory.