Despite the tagline from the whitepaper, it's always been clear to me that bitcoin was an Austrian-style sound money system and could not scale to be a network for small payments. I think bitcoin has remained consistent with the original vision and design.
I remember using Bitcoin to buy coffee in town back in the day (2014, 2015-ish). All the retailers stopped accepting it as payment due to the results of the scaling debate. Steam, WordPress, Microsoft and others. If its current design under the block size limit was clear to you, it very much wasn't clear to me back then.
Just making blocks bigger isn't enough to scale bitcoin to Visa levels, so making on-chain bitcoin payments work for small payments was never on the table.
It would have required a radical redesign of bitcoin to even have a chance of success, and that has always been off the table and has been left for new, experimental digital currencies.
Bitcoin was originally invented as a "peer to peer electronic cash system". The fees have made it impossible to use it as such for quite some time.