Monero communities talk about the 'upgrades' to Monero. How 'lightning' will be built on Monero etc etc and will be better...

From what I can tell those things are no where near existing today. Bolt 12 is already in use, albeit with a few wallets. CLN supports it as does Ocean for payouts and Lightning is already widespread on Stacker News. This is in addition to wrapped invoices for LND?

'Lightning on Monero' from what I can tell isn't even developmental, it doesn't exist at all. And the coming hardfork for privacy could be years away.

If all these merchants and small busineses started using monero and all of a sudden there 'was a hardfork' i think it would greatly upset them. They would be confused by the changes... and they would have 'to upgrade' to stay in consensus and I don't see that as reasonable. Things need to be predictable and reasonably polished for businesses to accept them.... privacy notwithstanding.