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Yeah... The proximity incentive should come from something else, not just the latency. But I wonder how that split will begin. Same with nostr: we already know that a single relay (or a set or relays with the same clients for that matter) won't scale to the whole world. Bit at the same time no one wants to quit the main relays for specialized ones.
LN does not scale to everyone. From channel opening block space or operation complexity. So it looks like it's either cashu mint like custodial service providers (uncle Jims or institutions) or multiple chains.
Multiple chains could be defined by tradeoffs (Monero for example) or by proximity (merchants in this area use chain X). If fees ever get high enough, there would be a need/incentive for this.
Mail servers don't scale to everyone either, but they're addressable, so it generally works. Nostr is the same, it's most analogous to email, my indexer shows about 70% of active nostr users are at least partially compliant with the out/inbox models.
Client dominance seems to be the upstream issue with relay dominance, none of it matters if 90% of Nostr users are using it for shitposting on primal. This echoes email as well, setting up an email server is largely useless if you can't get it whitelisted by gmail and microsoft.
LN scales to as many people as Bitcoin does, Bitcoin's supply is the bottleneck. WAN-chains for back of a letter term don't solve that either... at the end of the day people for whom Bitcoin does not scale have to hold a form of credit. Ecash is credit, stables are credit, alt-chains are credit. The alt-chain isn't additive to a credit system in any way since swap providers can simply cease to exist or only complete swaps for which they have an arbitrage opportunity.
LN simply only needs to address how disparate credit solutions become addressable, we see that already with Mints, Statechains, Ark's etc... all forms of credit.
Fees only have one direction to go from here, down, there's literally not enough people that can hold Bitcoin to drive blockspace demand. We're trending towards the 200M institutions/HNWI ceiling using batch transactions for settlement. That makes credit inevitable just the same though, so the "proximity" of credit is trust. Assuming trust reflects economic proximity, and economic proximity reflects geographical proximity, we end up back at local credit unions and national currencies just running different software.
Locality wrt to block propagation latency isn't really material, so by local I think you'd have to mean private WAN's... on the open internet you may have better latency to another country than to parts of your own. This gets even more moot with satellite constellations taking increasing share of bandwidth.
These WAN-chains would also just be another form of credit, "atomic" swaps aren't really atomic as they're still arbitrage based, the parallel chain itself adds nothing.
The problem space also doesn't really exist, Bitcoin is already highly exclusive, and bound to such as a function of non-divisible supply. There's not enough supply for even every person in the US alone to use it. Block space is irrelevant, bigger blocks don't add supply, and the limited supply all but ensures blocks will only get smaller as purchasing power increases.
A community chain is ideally economic lightning peers. We've strayed from the light with LSP's etc, but eventually Lightning peering will skew towards economic proximity. If for example SN is where most of your Lightning Payments go, SN's Lightning node should be your first peer rather than some LSP... extend this to your farmer, doctor, etc.