I see what's going on here. You are convinced that if bitcoin users use lightning, they are no longer self-sovereign because of the 2nd-tier custodians. I guess there was a time when I would have argued that point too, maybe back in 2016.
But you lose sight of the goal with this argument; We are trying to make money that the government can't stop us from using. Uncensorable cash. That's bitcoin's reason to exist. Lightning extends that goal for everyone, although it's not completely private for everyone. Privacy is great, but not the goal here.
Think of privacy as a secondary goal for bitcoin that anyone at all can achieve under certain circumstances, but just isn't easy to deploy on a global scale. Those who tried to do that before forked off into Monero and 50 other privacy coins.
The real goal is hard enough and Satoshi somehow, against all odds, delivered it and privacy all in one package. And then as bitcoin grew popular all the normies wanted to keep their coins on exchanges and other custodians for speed's sake, and even that doesn't scale enough so we needed something like the lightning network.
So do I think something better than Lightning can be created for the sake of offering privacy? Sure. You betcha. But just that took 10 years, and you sure as hell aren't going to get me to use it if there's the faintest whiff of that network sacrificing uncensorability.
