Running your own node means you verify that the money you get onchain is real Bitcoin. You can also see that the total circulation hasn't been inflated. Since your node downloads the entire blockchain, nobody knows which addresses are yours either, so it's good for privacy. I'd recommend running your own node as part of the learning process so you know what is ground truth in Bitcoin.

Lightning is more challenging and I'd mainly do that if I were going to sell things in the $0.01-$1000 range for Bitcoin. There are mobile wallets that can do the lightning stuff by talking to your Bitcoin node.

Overall I'd say walk before you run. Sync up a Bitcoin core node on an old laptop running Ubuntu and go from there.