How the hell do you use Matic or Polygon?

I am interested in Matic.  It has risen significantly in price over the last year.  I have even owned it for a time.  Right now I have none.  I still don't fully understand Layer 2.  I thought layer 2 did the Ethereum transaction off chain and then record it back but now I am not so sure.  I just read a tutorial on how to use Matic and it seems you will need to use a bridge to take your Ethereum tokens off the Ethereum chain and wrap them so you can use Matic.

If that is the case, I can already wrap coins on the Binance Smart Chain and trade them faster and cheaper than with the Ethereum mainnet.  I understand that Matic will be fractions of a cent but I don't trade or exchange that often.  I am not sure if makes sense to trust an entirely new chain to save gas.  I imagine they will still need to incentivize liquidity pools so it is hard to imagine that trading will be free.  They still need to charge a fee to give to the liquidity provider for using their money.

I started looking into Loopring and Loopring appears to be a fancy AMM with lower fees. I haven't tried it yet.

I got pretty upset with Ethereum gas fees several months ago and I only hold a tiny amount of Ether and I conduct almost zero transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.