In addition, other scaling option (e.g. using LN or sidechain) needs on-chain TX to open LN channel or "peg" the coin on the sidechain. So very high TX fee would make those option not very attractive.
I've never used any sidechain, and it seems like "wrapped" centralized tokens are much more popular than actual sidechains. Replacing central banks by businesses is not what I hoped for.
Yeah, "wrapped" coin is definitely more popular. But either way, you still need one Bitcoin on-chain TX in order to send your Bitcoin to exchange/other service, to obtain the "wrapped" coin.
For the sake of the discussion, let's assume that the 16 MB limit is a harmless one. How do we enforce it in a softfork way? Segwit was enforced in a clever way, by separating the witness data from the transaction data. AFAIK, it's impossible to achieve it in softfork, unless you've figured out of another way to restructure the transaction data.
Most straightforward option would be increasing witness discount from 4 to 16. But without making Ordinal or other TX which use
OP_FALSE OP_IF ... OP_ENDIF non-standard, it'll just make cost to spam on Bitcoin blockchain even cheaper.