Yes to the elephant. Bitcoin had the same elephant until the newer chains and leader-based systems. Now we can convert BTC to STEEM and pay for a meal with STEEM, with the merchant being 100.00% sure about having the money in <1 minute.
We pushed the scalability issues further by getting rid of the PoW basically. On https://blocktivity.info you can see EOS is currently at 30% load and growing quick :) When it reaches ~80%+ people will start worrying and leaders will find ways to reduce the number of transactions (i.e. increasing the number of tokens needed to be stake to generate X ressources), then that's when the ponzi starts turning sour (small stake users unable to cashout or transact, developers will create forks with low-reputation block producers and run away from EOS, probably the big stake holders of EOS will exit at this point too...)
Honestly I don't think this problem will be solved for blockchains. If you want everyone on the planet to use blockchains on a daily basis, then it has to be a combination of hundreds of chains interconnected through multi coin/auth wallets and interoperable UIs, or other solutions that aren't strictly blockchains but similar to it (i.e. newer low-level techs like HOLO)