I see this comment every now and then, and it always forgets the cost of the transaction, confirmation time

With Bitcoin lightning the confirmation time is under a second and you pay pennies in fees as you don't make the transaction on the main chain. Even main chain is like $1.50 for a 10 minute confirmation time which for many transactions like an international wire is still a great deal.

The energy cost is extraordinary, and the end user is taxed for the use of their own dollars.

The energy cost to maintain the base chain is <1% of global energy use, mostly from renewables at off-peak hours since miners have to chase the cheapest electricity. Remittance services and other funds transfer companies also use energy and human capital to move value around, it's not free. A single on-chain tx can open a lightning channel which can contain and secure trillions of transactions off-chain. Processing these transactions takes the energy equivalent of sending an e-mail. Users are "taxed for the use of their own dollars" in regular currency as well. Who pays that tax and the amount of that tax varies by context.

It can't scale

In the last two months alone, Nostr users (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 3 million tips over Bitcoin lightning. It absolutely scales. And there is plenty of more room to grow.

Its value only increases because it manufactures its own scarcity.

Its value also comes from its use as a transactional network and from it's political neutrality geopolitically speaking. And from the known supply which nobody can manipulate. It's not purely scarcity.

naturally moves toward centralization since mining becomes too large an activity for the individual to reap any benefit

And yet mining is still distributed globally. Any person, company, or country with spare energy resources can buy an ASIC and mine. Mining pools have become more centralized, but a lot of work has been done on that in recent years and that trend is reversing as a result.