When SegWit was about to be implemented there was a big argument about how much of a potential bandwidth and storage increase current infrastructure could support.
Those issue mentioned some time before SegWit about to be activated on mainnet. You probably refer to general block size discussion before 2017.
Bitcoin layer 2s are not bitcoin and even the more let's say promoted solutions like the one programmed by Adam Back are flawed in their design.
There's a centralised point of entry and exit for BTC in and out of this system and the issue remains that this ends up being trust based along with all the problems of centralisation.
There are so many project claim to be Bitcoin layer 2. But not all of them are highly centralized, see
https://www.bitcoinlayers.org.
Remember, this is the reason we got 2MB SegWit instead of 4!
SegWit does not increase block size to 2MB. SegWit upgrade actually increase block size limit increased from 1MB to 4 million weight unit (or 1 vMB), where theoretically a block can have a size up to 4MB.