LAYER2 BAD!

Overall, all layer two solutions have their place but aren't the solution, just a solution that make sense for specific ecosystems and contexts, and not as a general solution to scaling.
I doubt if Eth demanded a sidechain for dapps we'd have seen the explosion in innovation that we've seen over teh past 5 years. Moreover, if you use Layer2 solutions, at some point they need to settle through the base layer1 to move funds/etc around to a different layer2 app... you can't really go Layer2->Layer2 direction, mainnet settlement is needed (layer2->layer1->layer2). If Layer1 isn't scalable, then at some point, assuming adoption takes place, layer1 will get congested enough that fees on txs go through the roof.

THE biggest unsolved problem in crypto for the last decade has been: how do we scale layer-1? Specifically, how do you shard/partition layer-1 ledger state. It has been a unsolved problem for so long, and so many BS "solutions" have been pitched, that most people have given up on decentralized layer-1 scaling being a solvable problem (and have turned to centralized and/or layer-2 solutions instead.

Did zk advance really quickly w/o me learning of it? Or are is the Eth community avoiding the fact that, for matters more complicated than a simple ledger, zk has somewhere between a quadratic and factorial performance tax. Maybe I missed something, because I thought that something like cryptokitties, which just isn't that complicated, couldn't practically run on an off-chain, zk basis.

Who knows though, maybe someone super clever figured out a way to replicate the DAO with zk rollups