I usually go to 1ml.com and check out most connected nodes and try to stick to using ones that are not big centralized exchanges. I also peep out the fee rate and open channels to people with a good history of staying online and have reasonably low fee rate. Main purpose of my node is to spend and receive I am not so focused on routing and routing fees or I'd have a different approach.

Decent approach I thought of for lightning merchants is to have a big channel with Boltz. Once channel is full go to boltz.exchange and empty channel to get all receive liquidity back and convert to Liquid Btc. Rinse and repeat until you have decent amount of Liquid BTC. Then peg out for one big on chain btc utxo.