Usability for the masses?

I consider myself pretty tech savvy. In fact it's my line of work. Recently I started mining eth just to get a hang of how it works. It's only been a few months but there are things that are confusing to me, or that seem like would be a barrier for everyday people to use eth. I really like the idea of DeFi and actually holding your own money, not relying on a bank.

The transaction fees seem high on L1 for everyday use, and using L2 are too slow and complicated for everyday people. Is the solution to use exchanges like Coinbase? Seems like that would just be the new version of a bank.

Do I not have enough experience to make an informed decision yet? Am I missing something else? Personally I'm not interested in eth as an investment (yet -I don't know enough to dump a bunch of money in) I'm more interested in usability to replace the banking infrastructure that exists today.

Any comments or links to good YouTube channels are appreciated. Thanks!