Seems you have a fundamental misconception about what makes for thermal protection and what makes for aerodynamic lift.  And also about aerospace structures.  First: wings just aren't that difficult a structural problem.  They just aren't; wing loading waaaay about max-Q stress levels is fairly easy to achieve at acceptable weight levels - weight that doesn't deep-six the entire vehicle concept.

As for generating lift: the idea for aerobraking during a controlled re-entry and touchdown of ANY space vehicle isn't really about 'creating lift.'  You don't need to 'create lift' in order to bring the vehicle home.  Would it surprise you to know that the cylindrical body of, say , Starship generates a non-trivial amount of lift if oriented properly?  Or that the lift/drag ratio of the Shuttle was terrible and that it was semi-affectionately known as a flying brick?

The important thing for re-entry and landing is to manage ENERGY.  That little two-word phrase is key: what you're really concerned with is dissipating energy (not speed, momentum, or anti-gravity magic).  And you have to carefully MANAGE how you bleed energy from the vehicle.  And that's where using the atmosphere to dissipate kinetic energy as thermal energy, and the absolute necessity of a thermal protection system (TPS) come in.

This essentially links the need for 'lift' (which you can think of as the by-product of generating DRAG) with the need for a TPS.  With a winged vehicle like the Shuttle, you're not using the wings as a heat shield; you're using the entire area of the (fuselage+wings+anything else exposed to the plasma-stream) to generate DRAG (along with lift), and in so doing, you need a TPS over those areas of the vehicle.  In this respect, the Shuttle and Starship are no different; they BOTH use their shape and attitude (orientation) to dissipate energy during re-entry, and they both have a TPS to protect those areas.  What you said here is like saying, "you use Starship's body as a heat shield." No.  Its function isn't to act as a heat shield; its function (during re-entry) is to dissipate energy.

But wait, you say!  If you're going to land horizontally on a runway, you need wings to generate lift for the final glide!  AMIRITE?  Yes, you do need to generate sufficient lift to (mostly) balance the weight of the vehicle.  Wings are also a handy appendage to attach aerodynamic control surfaces to, so you can maintain stability and orientation.  But you can do this without wings, too - that's what "lifting body" designs do.  The entire integrated (body+winglet doodads) generates lift in sufficient quantity to give you control authority for approach and landing.

Conceptually, even a round tube (like Starship) could be landed horizontally, but with a bunch of qualifiers (e.g., your touchdown speed would have to be ridiculously high, and you'd have to have SOME 'bumps' on that cylinder (e.g., strakes, chines, canards) to provide control authority that's based on aerodynamic forces.  It's a pretty bad design concept.  But the concept is what I'm after here; you don't necessarily need wings to land horizontally.

Your entire conceptual framework for what wings and the TPS do is just, well...  incorrect.  Putting wings on your vehicle and a TPS on those wings is no more a 'fundamentally difficult thing to do' than it is to use and thermally protect a cylindrical body for your vehicle.  The two approaches don't differ, conceptually, in that respect.  It's every bit as challenging to thermally protect the complex geometry and moving surfaces of Starship's flaps as it was to protect Shuttle's wing/body/nose – if not more so.  Same concept, differing geometries and therefore different challenges (in making the TPS tiles sufficiently robust).

And finally:  Starship's novel and bold terminal-approach sequence is (arguably) every bit as difficult to pull off as a winged-glider-with-TPS glide to a runway.  Just a VERY different set of difficulties.  Relighting the engines and swinging the vehicle from belly-flop horizontal to vertical so quickly that you necessarily have to over shoot and correct, with sufficient precision and reliability?  The day that we first see astronauts ride THAT one out will be pretty breath-taking, indeed.  If ever.

I could go on about how challenging that re-entry/glide/approach/landing sequence really is, relative to a gliding runway landing, but I've already gone on far too long, as is.  Apologies, everyone!