I agree about on-chain self-custody.

But w.r.t. LN:

I don't even know "the right way". I use WoS myself, where I hold a whopping 15k sats, probably barely enough for a meal in El Salvador, most of which comes from withdrawals from custodial SN, which you're also using; the rest is satograms and a few nostr zaps. While I'm running a full Bitcoin node, I don't fancy setting up a Lightning node or using Phoenix or similar and paying more to open a channel than my WoS balance.

And I don't know what the future of LN is; I like the custodial UX I've had using it, but I don't know where it's all headed. There are many issues that need to be solved, I don't know if it can scale to replace Visa and Mastercard for example, and some bitcoiners with much more knowledge express the same doubts. So I prefer not to claim authoritatively to know "the right way".

Even when it comes to on-chain self-custody, it's something affordable currently, but may not remain so forever.

Also, as much as I like to support Bitcoin and its ecosystem, I don't think I should feel guilty for following the incentives.

When I gave a Bitcoin lesson to a friend, I explained self-custody to him and the importance of it. For a wow factor though, I ended up getting him to install WoS and sending him 100 sats, and he liked how easy it was. Unfortunately he didn't seem interested enough to consider buying corn, so those 100 sats is all he has. And I don't think teaching him how to set up a LN node (which even I haven't set up) would have turned that by 180 degrees and made him super-enthusiastic, not least because I'd have been hard pressed to muster any enthusiasm myself.

It's worth mentioning he bought some corn on Binance many years ago, maybe 2m sats, but he forgot his password and considers them lost. I gently hinted that he should contact their customer service to see if he can recover his account, but 2 months later he doesn't seem to have gotten around to it, so I take it it's not high on his priority list. And that may be a good thing, because if he could access them, he'd sell them.

Now, those 100 sats may be harder to lose, but he could still forget the name of the wallet or which email address he registered it with, however impossible in may sound to you.

I understand you'd be eager to help him set up an LN node. But the real world, outside of geeky forums, features people you may not realize exist. And lots of them.