I may be hated for saying this, but what's currently happening in the mempool is a feature, not a bug. The fact that we have a fixed-sized block limit means that the current clogged up state would inevitably happen sometime.
I'm going to disagree with you. The fact that Bitcoin is currently useless for small transactions, and very expensive for large transactions is a serious problem.
I never said it isn't a serious problem. What I said is "it's a feature". Here's another feature: 21 million cap. "But this might not sustain the miners' income". I know. It might not. But, it's a feature nonetheless. Same applies to a fixed-sized block limit. It's inevitable that rich people will outweigh the poor sometimes, in terms of confirmation priority.
I'm now teaching my kids to use Monero
You're a father figure! I wish I had a father who taught me about Bitcoin and Monero. Congratulations.

LN isn't going to solve this if opening and closing a channel costs a week worth of food.
Agreed.
Reinstating the "coin days destroyed" priority mechanism can help. Spammers can't destroy unlimited coin days, but this isn't in the interest of miners. And that's a fundamental problem: the ones who earn from high fees benefit from the flaws in the fee system.
Doesn't prevent the problem, perhaps discourages it by a little bit. What if they mint these tokens through centralized platforms with enormous amounts of UTXOs? I also don't like coins days destroyed, because it's anti-fungibility. A coin with value 100 days is more valuable than one that was just created.
I just hate seeing Bitcoin lose market share to shitcoins, because Bitcoin can't handle the transaction volume that comes with it's popularity.
The sooner we accept that Bitcoin cannot handle the entire populace on-chain, the better. Free markets are trial-and-error based. If Bitcoin has erred as electronic cash, then it's down to us to see which change in a crypto-protocol would make it look more like cash. Maybe there is none. Maybe it's dynamical block size. Maybe it's tail emission. Or even a compression method we haven't even thought of. In practice, we see which is more recognized as cash.
A lot of Monero proponents on Twitter are bragging about Monero, and how it's better cash. Do they have any idea how bad the system works if the network was clogged up with gigabytes of monkeys every once in a while? I know, it'd still be cheap, but to finish syncing you'd have to verify like a million of monkey-ring signatures, which would slow down it by orders of magnitude.