I'm sorry if I appear a bit dense, but this is the part of bitcoin I least understand. On an individual level, when transferring person to person, are the transactions ever more complex than just remove funds from here and add it to another wallet?
No it's not real, the cost to do a simple transfer up until yesterday has been in the ballpark of 0.1-0.15. This very moment it's around $1. You can see the current estimated cost here: https://mempool.space
In addition to that, there's always the Lightning Network as well wherein you can transact for fractions of pennies.
The lightning network only allows you to transact if you fund a channel first, which requires an on-chain Bitcoin transaction to create and eventually one to close, thus incurring transaction costs twice.
You should fund a LN channel for more than one transaction because you cannot change the channel funds after creation, so you better make sure enough is in it. This makes it unsuitable for things that require more than a tiny fraction of your monthly income, e.g. rent.
LN channels also need to be constantly monitored to not get scammed, which the LN whitepaper suggests you to pay third parties for.
The LN whitepaper completely obmits the routing problem, too. It more or less says "we don't want to think about that now". A network whitepaper that doesn't think about routing, imagine that.
What? You can download a lightning wallet right now and I can send you sats without you having to fund anything or even provide any personal information.
Yes, that makes it a closed system, but it was never realistic to have every single person on earth access bitcoin via on-chain transactions.
When people say this, do they mean $5/$20 per bitcoin or per any transaction whatever size?