I don't think that is true because HTLCs are an escrow bond and they are self-custodial. An HTLC contract says that party A gets money if they reveal a secret within a certain time frame, otherwise party B gets that money. There is no third party C who enforces that contract, the two parties (A and B) enforce it themselves, directly on bitcoin, and until they do so, any money in the contract is escrowed.

In lightning you retain full control of all the keys to access the BTC and it is the purpose. It's an example of a fully self-custodial scaling solution. I would like to see more of them. As well as improvements to lightning itself so it can scale better.

I have no problem with using good code from another crypto but EVM is bad code. Their decision to use an account model instead of a utxo model needlessly magnifies the complexity of node software, and their reliance on publishing contract data on chain makes their designs pointlessly expensive and wasteful. I greatly prefer the way Liquid does it and would much rather see a Spiderchain that adopts Elements opcodes rather than the EVM.