Yes. Demand for block space will increase organically as all 8 billion people on earth are onboarded and will want to at least control a few utxo's over their lifetime

Yep, and if the demand wanes for a while, miners that can't afford to stay in business will die off, leaving more competitive miners in their place. It's always gonna be there.

all evidence to the contrary. you literally just said people were using LN instead. and >90% of people don't self custody anyway. so thats hopium and not predicated on any actual real world usage.

Difficulty will drop, it'll be lucrative once again to mine and we off go again. The beauty is in its unstructured simplicity.

I think what you mean is if theres no demand for block space, the miner's margin become razor thin and only the MOST competitive miners can afford to stay in business which means the net amount of energy protecting the network *decreases