I think that this perception depends greatly on the region.
While I expect that in most Western countries and especially in US the number of LN services grow significantly, I have 100$ in my LN wallet and I was unable to spend a dime of that during this year's holiday (both inside my country and abroad, but not in capital cities).
Sure, I don't mean to reject that statement. I merely ask posters to be more precise. You can't make general statements regarding the global state of something based off of your local experiences. In most cases you will have to look for LN accepting places in advance and actively go to them. It is not likely that you will find them by chance wherever you decided to go. The people who live in a LN accepting environment are the lucky ones.
So yeah, if it covers "the others" but not yourself, it kinda sux...
As I said, if you want to see the adoption you need to help it happen. In any case you can use LN for online things whenever you have so you get to at least have a taste of the experience.
However
node and channel statistics are still a bit disappointing as they basically stagnate, even if in the last month there seems to have been a slight increase (around 2%) which may hint that the tendency is changing. On the other hand, the value of the coins locked in LN channels has hit several ATHs in 2025 (now it's a bit below the ATHs, but that's because Bitcoin price has decreased a little bit).
Currently onchain transaction fees are however very low, and also the "currency" use is stagnating as still speculative/store-of-value use prevails. These two factors are imo holding LN back right now.
It is, but perhaps this is not primarily a problem that comes from LN itself but rather from the overall lowered rate of participation in the market by retail. I see that that current sentiment is very low. On chain activity everywhere is extremely low. For shitcoin chains to get the real picture you have to subtract most or all automated systems such as on-chain bots. Once you do that you will see just how bad retail participation is right now.

Nevertheless, the difficulty in setting up a node and LN in general plays a role. To be honest, I think it is perfectly fine to tell people to simply use mobile wallets that manage this for you. Since for LN we are talking about small amounts of Bitcoin it should not be an issue.
We should not let perfection cause friction for adoption in this case. LN nodes are not as important as on chain nodes.