Why do L2 scalings solutions require their own token? Lightning doesn't need one so why so they?

It's weird if you think about it. Imagine if Lightning was made such that you had to buy THUNDER token to use it. How stupid would that be? Yet that's exactly the situation going on in the alt coins space.

It seems like the classic case of the hare and the tortoise. Lightning was proposed 7 years ago and has slowly but surely plodded along. Meanwhile in the alt coin space you had these L2 tokens popping up like flies these past year. Rushing out something barely even decentralised just to get rich off their token floating around in the space. But now Lightning has shown how nonsense these all are. Why do they need their own token to perform scaling solutions