Doing some research in selecting capacitors for high frequency applications, concept of equivalent series inductance comes up a lot. Apparently all capacitors have this parasitic inductance which appears in series with the capacitance of the component. If the ESL is high, in high frequencies this inductive reactance can even cancel out the capacitive reactance, and the cap essentially acts as a resistor which blocks DC.
But why is the ESL so significant? Sure, caps have wires, but I would imagine the rest of the circuit has much more wire and therefore much higher parasitic inductance which would be much bigger problem than the short component leads. Otherwise caps are just plates with a dielectric in between, so what is it about them that causes us to worry about ESL so much?
When it comes to electrolytic capacitors, I found one explanation: It was explained that as the cap is basically a long piece of foil rolled, there is definitely a lot of inductance since the roll of foil acts kind of like a coil. But I don't think this makes sense at all: It's not like the current travels along the foil! The current builds up an electric field in one foil, which again produces a current in the other foil. But this field appears across the foils, not along it, so this explanation makes no sense to me.
So could somebody explain this phenomenon to me, preferably in the context of both ceramic and electrolytic capacitors?