Feels like

As a bitcoin miner, this is probably your perspective. And it makes total sense...

Why would anyone pay for anything using a UTXO? Your entire savings and financial history can be doxxed with any spend you make unless you pay considerable fees on coinjoin or swaps or painstaking UTXO management schemes, or you spend from a custodial wallet that pools many user's UTXOs in to batch transactions.

As a lightning node operator, it feels like more people than ever are using Bitcoin for spending. I did the math one time and my humble node has routed over 10 blocks of BTC transactions (if you assume every route and txn my node processed would have used the average bytes required to spend a UTXO onchain)

And this ability to route payments on LN is open to anyone who has some capital to deploy and knowledge and skills to operate a node. Those transactions just aren't publicized (because LN has decent privacy) so BTC, when you look at the public stats, appears to be used less and less over time as more people are educated to the risks of using onchain and adopt other means to transfer sats like Lightning and custodial accounts.

Is that where it was always heading?

I’ve read people debating this. The narrative of number go up and the popular financialization of BTC in ETFs and Microstrategy is certainly pushing things towards saving

E: I still don’t see many common platforms I use offering it as a payment method. Also a lot of people like to use WBTC as collateral for borrowing and play yield games, so in that sense it’s being saved long term and borrowed against

i think in the West in general it's always been more of a hodl thing and ngu moon dreams, where as , as someone else said, in the global south you see it being used more for payments and a bit of hedging

they're the same thing.

mind-bloooowwwwn

I think it depends on which region you're looking at this from. In the global south, particularly in Africa, people save Bitcoin and they spend Bitcoin. And it is quite fascinating to see.