And we pay large amounts of money to middlemen to access these connections. And these middlemen can often block your traffic at will. Why not just use banks at this point?
In lightning, you need only virtually connect them.
There's a literal world of difference between the two.
Theres still a middleman with plain BTC, its just that there are a ton of them, and little barrier to entry to becoming a middleman yourself. Lightning requires things which realistically only banks will be able to provide, large payment channels. The whole point is that when you can store your balance on a decentralize ledger, there's no need for a bank.