In #Bitcoin, the token is the thing itself. This continues to be the case in Lightning, where channel-update transactions are themselves legit Bitcoin transactions. Nothing is owed. Neither channel participant is a creditor nor debtor of the other. It’s a peer-to-peer, electronic, cash system.

Problem is you have several competing channel-update transactions just hanging there until one of them is used and then it's a race where someone with a newer update-transaction can overrule the old, but only for a limited time period. So the participants can be perceived as creditor or debitor of each other.