The error is in neglecting that the radius at the outside is larger than the radius at the inside; yet you just use the radius at the outside for calculating the onion layer's area. The mistake is most obviously seen in the innermost layer, which is just the circle of radius $1$. The inner border of that layer is the central point of the circle, which has length zero! Consequently, the area you calculate for the innermost layer is $2\pi\cdot 1 = 2\pi$ while its actual area is $\pi\cdot 1^2 = \pi$, so you overstate the area of that layer by a factor of two!
OK, so if you take the outer circumference of your layer, you obviously get a result that's too large. On the other hand, if you take the inner circumference of your layer, you get a result that's too small. So what circumference to take? Well, if the innermost circle is too small and the outermost circle is too large, then obviously you need the circumference of some circle in between.
So let's just take the circle in the middle. For the $n$-th onion layer that has the radius $n-\frac12$, and therefore you now get
$$A = 2\pi\cdot\left(1-\frac12\right) + 2\pi\cdot\left(2-\frac12\right) + \ldots = 2\pi \frac{n(n+1)}{2} - n\cdot 2\pi\cdot\frac{1}{2} = \pi n^2$$
OK, but how do we now know that this is the correct value? After all, we could have chosen any other value?
Well, it makes sense that the radius of the circle to take is always at some fixed fraction between inner and outer radius, which means that for your thickness $1$ layers you'll always have a radius of $n-x$, with $x$ a number between $0$ and $1$.
Now let's look at the two innermost layers. If we take just one layer, we see that the layer is itself just the circle of radius 1. Its area is then, accoirding to out formula, $A_1=2\pi(1-x)$ If, instead, we take the first two layers, we see that we get the circle of radius two. Now the circle of radious two is just the circle of radius $1$ dilated to double size. Elementary geometry tells us that it has thus $2^2=4$ times the area of the original circle, thus its area is
$$A_2=4A_1=8\pi(1-x)$$
On the other hand, the "onion formula" tells us that its area is
$$A_2=2\pi(1-x) + 2\pi(2-x) = 2\pi(3-2x)$$
The only way both formulas can be true at the same time is if
$$8\pi(1-x) = 2\pi(3-2x)$$
which means
$$x=\frac12$$