There’s at least 3 L2s all with different downsides that I’m aware of. Pretty sure you need like 20 ETH to run a ETH node, can you tell me how much bitcoin you need to run a lightning node? The answer is as small as the party you’re opening a channel to is willing to accept. While yes payments go through major LN nodes they don’t have the ability to censor transactions or change anything about the protocol.