Yah, if you had a proper LN node, you could direct the funds to its on chain wallet, and you’d have immediate access right now. You’d then be in control of your own UTXOs and could still send them from there to phoenix or use them there to open a new channel and spend over lightning. During congested times you’d still incur a txn fee when doing so, but if you set up channels during low fee times, you’d be able to use previously created liquidity to bridge yourself through the high fee environment to try and avoid those txn fees when you’d want.
This is a better part of the experiment tbh, dealing with high fee environment is critical learning opportunity for getting paid in btc directly. Could also ask coin telegraph to set up a LN node and open a channel with them to you and have them
see if they could manage a node themselves.