Well thats not entirely true. Lightning network _does_ use bitcoin smart contracts settled on-chain as a way to provide more liquidity for efficient payment rou

Well thats not entirely true. Lightning network _does_ use bitcoin smart contracts settled on-chain as a way to provide more liquidity for efficient payment routing. So it is bootstrapped to the same decentralization/trustlessness (mostly). The analogy here is that its like saying: using TCP (layer 4) for transport reliability isn't giving up on IP (layer 3), its building on top of it. You still get the benefits of the basal level protocol.