the lightning network is not activated.
That's wrong, the Bitcoin lightning network has been operating for 6 months or so
People's minds are still in December where the costs were quite high. I see a lot of posts in this forum where people keep saying that bitcoin fees are high. 'even if it's currently some cents)
I don't know if it's ignorance or they haven't done a single bitcoin transaction in their life.
In Bitcoin 0.18.0 (release slated for March 2019), minimum fees are proposed to drop by 80%. Anyone still maintaining Bitcoin has high fees this time next year is gonna look a little strange. By that time, segwit and lightning usage are likely to have increased even more, which will only put further downward pressure on fees in the direction of the new minimum rate.
Someday, that fee might look more like $10, $100 or more.
It's the cheapest if you need Bitcoin's security. I think there are lots of cases where that's probably not necessary -- smaller/micro payments and such. Offchain mechanisms like Lightning are one option, sidechains are another. Altcoins are another. In fact, once inter-protocol compatibility is figured out, any altcoin that can communicate and interact with Bitcoin is effectively a sidechain. All these options involve security trade-offs: They don't have Bitcoin's security, but they can be much cheaper to use.
It's unlikely that Bitcoin will ever need such high fees when you take into account all the on-chain scaling options that can be implemented long term.
The case for using atomic swaps to avoid Bitcoin's on-chain fees makes no sense at all: you need to have a payment channel open to do the swap, plus you need to pay a lightning routing fee to do the swap. Paying over the lightning network directly can only be the cheapest option in that case. How can you possibly save any money by paying additional fees to send on a different chain too?
The block reward halving will happen in May by the way and not in June according
to current projections (Reward-Drop ETA date: 21 May 2020 15:43:57).
If the hashrate continues to grow as it has been, the projections are that April 2020 is the more likely date for the next block reward halving. Long time till then, we will see.