Bitcoin can scale, and will. That isn't really the debate, the debate is how will it scale.
The scalability problem has been known for years. It could have been solved before there were any problems – but it wasn't. It should have been solved when the problems became evidently clear for everybody, when the blocks became full and fees went high – but so far nothing has been done.
That's why I have very little trust in Bitcoin and I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. It has a governance problem, which is so big that it prevents all the most important development from happening.