You can not send the BTC to just about anybody. Only to people with whom you have a channel open. If you want to send to anybody you need to hop through other channels using middlemen. That sounds very similar to the function of a bank.

You are right, if you want to send directly from your wallet to another user's wallet with no middlemen, you need to have a channel open with that user, which you totally can and will save you on fees in the long-term if you transact with that person frequently. But I don't do this because it's un-necessary, you can also send funds to any other person on lightning via these middlemen. The middlemen don't have custody of the funds, they can't block/reverse/do anything with the transaction aside from just forward it along. You can choose who those "middlemen" are, they are usually selected based on the lowest expected fee. They route data around, if they are banks, then so are other Bitcoin nodes you connect to on main chain. But we don't think of them as banks right? They just relay data around and they're decentralized. You are right that they share a similar function of routing payments, the difference is in how they do that and who controls what parts of that process. Banks have immense power over your funds. Lightning nodes you route a payment through have none and anybody can run one.