After having run a node for a while, I would say it is a poorly thought out protocol to operate when there are high fees on the base layer.

It doesn’t work well in a self custodial way unless you have existing liquidity as the high fees mean it is too costly to open channels. Worse still is the force close mechanism which wastes a lot of sats of the node operators.

Add to that the buggy software implementations that make those force closes more likely..

But for the moment I don’t think there is a better option..