Having taken the route of self-custodial/self-sovereign from Bitcoin to Lightning, I can see very clearly why people would use WoS and friends; it is much, much easier - by a whole lot. Even now, there are aspects I still don't get regarding channels, to be honest.

The biggest driver is simplicity. It wins, by default. It's easier to just install an app and be immediately ready to go, compared to bootstrapping an entire full node with the whole blockchain taking a literal week to download and then fumbling around with CLN and plugins (which was my route, I didn't look much into LND to be honest) and finally arriving at a wallet, that looks good... but only half as good as WoS to be honest and fair.

Lightning is very complicated imo - it's learning curve is steep and the amount of times I had to backtrack between LNBits docs and C-Lightning docs was intense, just to get a rough understanding of what things really are. And thus, I can see why people would use a simpler alternative.

That said - I fully agree with you regardless. Bitcoin was - from what I have seen, read and heared - ment to empower the individual. Everyone can run a node, even on somewhat cheap hardware (I run mine on an SBC, in fact) and thus, everyone can partake. Lightning was ment to be a much speedier way of sending bitcoin, but being on a higher level introduced other complications. However, working through it is rewarding and gives you full control over basically everything. But getting there requires very good understanding of a terminal, services, process architecture, permission management and subsequent hardening (and I am very sure mine isn't perfect by a longshot). So, while everyone "can" do these things, not everyone "could" (for the lack of a better term at this point), which is very unfortunate and why WoS and friends (need to?) exist.

Then again... How many coiners still use birdapp, instagram and other centralized services? It's sometimes convenience, and sometimes habbit, I guess o.o