It's delightful to read in-depth articles like that seem unbiased.
I am sceptical about the Lightning Network, I agree that if they can solve routing and the rest of it's problems it could be a great tool. But I am not sure how it can be mass adopted by people if they have to run a node and their LN node needs to be online all the time.
Also the miner's don't really have an incentive to mine and secure a chain from which they are not getting fees and rewards from. Sure the block reward is enough for a time but at the next halving or at the one after that it could cause a problem. Unless the coin price doubles, or quadruples in value, but then you also have to keep the difficulty rising in mind as well.