~Snipped
What are my options?
I thought of Lightning but that is still going to cost me a lot in transaction fees when opening a channel. And since this is a one time purchase, it defeats its purpose because, well, might as well just directly purchase using btc.
So...what can I do?
With Bitcoin, you've very limited options when it comes to transaction fees. At least on ethereum, you can just bolt away to the cheapest EVM chain whether it's L2 or side chain as long as it gets the job done. My current workaround to evade high fees on Bitcoin to simply to set a transaction fee that meets the minimum requirement for ViaBTC's tx accelerator and hit send. Then I try to time the hourly tx submission to their free transaction accelerator. As long as your tx hit the minimum criteria, you should be good to go even if your tx fee is 50% less than the recommended fee based on the mempool.
https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator