The sats I am buying these days stay at custodians, as crazy as it is. Tx fees are like insurance policy, that is too high. I am taking the risk.
If you wondering why the degens are willing to pay exorbitant fees to create tokens and NFTs on chain where block space is limited and slow and have no interest in moving to a side chain which could be cheaper, here's a break down of reasons why they like the way things are and won't be keen on changing it
https://thebitcoinmanual.com/articles/ordinals-move-liquid-sidechain/
Discussion
I don't give a damn what any judge or government thinks about anyone, including Binance. So I go on using Binance, especially that I find their system exceptionally high quality. Now, because of tx fees caused by ordinals, I also use Binance (among other custodials) for long time storing a part of my savings.
I get that everyone has to make that decision now, its not just about paying premium fees now, but if you're creating small UTXOs in your wallet you're only going to penalise yourself in the future too
Sure you can go with a custodian be that an exchange or an LSP, or even a federated custodian like Liquid, all about your risk profile i suppose, until you're ready to go on chain.
No right or wrong way to stack really, just as long as you know the risk and happy with it.
Is liquid perfect? No but I think 14 custodians colluding versus 1 seems like a marginally better option for me, but to each their own