You are right sadly. I came to the same conclusion as you, without channels with these big hubs it's almost impossible to have a good LN experience for amount above 100/200 k SATs, or you have to lay the price... And even if you can by connecting to multiple middle sized nodes, it's mostly because they are themselves connected to the massive node of ACINQ or WoS.

My hope is that the liquidity will maybe increase if the value of Bitcoin goes up. For example I don't plan to depriciate my own node if Bitcoin goes 10x in price so liquidity in USD term would be 10 times higher on my node. So even if the principal driver for liquidity increasing is demand and usage obviously, maybe an increase in price could substantially increase the liquidity, allowing for bigger payments to be routed by medium or even small nodes (0,5 to 10 BTC) but it's only speculation here