And all the solutions to this are to create a supplementary payment processing network that uses Bitcoin for settlement... ya know like Visa.

Not on lightning network

There’s hardly been growth in the value of transactions on Lightning, compared to the 20x growth on various L2 solutions on Ethereum like Loopring, zkSync, etc. Lightning’s UX is poor as well, where both parties need to be online at the same time.

Lightning is a competitor to Visa...

According to the article, Visa is looking at using "the cryptocurrency USD Coin" (whatever that is)

So this has nothing to do with bitcoin (except inasmuch as any news article with the word "crypto" in the headline will trigger a bunch of FOMO buyers and drive up the price)

It's a stable coin (it's pegged to the dollar) which runs on Ethereum

https://www.circle.com/en/usdc

Monero is > 1600 transactions per second and it's set to scale with CPU power and network bandwidth along with further improvements to the underlying implementation.

Proof of Stake is much greater still. Cardano and Polkadot for example.

I thought CPU power was great until someone pointed out to me that this just encourages botnets.

While CPU power theft via malware is a real issue, it in no way prevents Monero from working well.

It actually just adds more nodes to the network. And of the many forms of botnet malware, it seems one of the less harmful.

zk-rollups are going to help a lot in that regard. maybe not billions of transactions per day but at least an order of magnitude above what is currently possible, all with the same security as the base layer ethereum