well, in those days the payment use case was more viable due to the relatively low transaction demand thus the expensive use case, payment, was viable

this is now becoming unviable and shitcoinery is making it more unviable, but we have LN and ecash to help shift payments off chain without weakening the security of the base layer 

 in this respect, bitcoin's evolution is a bit different from most kinds of commodity money because it is also an accounting system 

 Words and analogies used to describe bitcoin come from a pre-bitcoin era and are therefore inherently lacking.