The lightning network constantly changes, which makes it hard to give general recommendations for running a node.

I think the most important aspect is that you should define a realistic goal. This could be "earn more sats in fees than I have to spend onchain" (which ignores the hot-wallet risk, server cost, or the value of one's time). Another aspect could be "I'm happy as long as I understand what's going on and learn new things on a daily basis" or "I need something to tinker with". These goals aren't easy to reach, but anything more than that takes a serious amount of dedication (and skills and capital). For me, it was a combination of those, with lots of tooling (think rebalance-lnd, lnd-manageJ), some research-y stuff like Pickhardt Payments, and lots of feerate tweaking.

You should keep in mind that running a node is no push-a-button-and-forget-about-it thing. You'd need to spend time with the node on an almost daily basis for a long time until you get things right and automated. You'll make mistakes, suffer from bugs and high fee waves, and most likely you'll get very little in return. If you enjoy creating something (abstract), or even just understanding how something works, that's very helpful to stay motivated.

Capital wise, I'd say roughly 5 BTC are necessary to provide node that gets used by others. The more, the better. I'm aware that this is quite a bit in fiat terms, but that's just how it is.

I don't know of any "successors", nor do I plan to create one myself. There are other hobby nodes, though. I even consider lnbig to be a hobby project, even though with quite a lot of capital involved :)