Not necessarily, you can have 1 very large channel that adds more capacity than 100 small channels.
Do you run a full node/lightning node?
Discussion
Is it expensive/profitable/time consuming to create a channel?
I don’t run a node or LN node, but that’s because I’ve moved every year for a long time. When I finally plant some more firm roots I plan to set both up and maybe a personal mining rig as well.
You can run a node for free if you have an old laptop with around 512GB-1Tb of storage. Otherwise the hardware really only costs a few hundred bucks. It’s not profitable but there are many big advantages to running your own node
It costs probably on a few cents of electricity a month to keep running for me 24/7 so it’s not a huge operational cost