LN does not have perfect privacy in all situations.

You should be using both LN and coinjoin if you want to maximize privacy.

I view coinjoins and LN as very different use cases that can provide some of the same benefits. I agree with you that lightning can be very private, but I don’t want to have large amounts of bitcoin tied up in a hot wallet on a lightning node. There is too much risk there. I’m going to coinjoin it and send it to a hardware wallet.

I’ll keep a several hundred thousand sats in a lightning node but not more than that.

please clarify if this is incorrect... but my understanding is that coinjoinining a utxo prior to opening a lightning channel with it is important (or at least can be).

this is because the receiver of the funds (on lightning) can look and see the 'opening channel transaction' originally used to create the 'sending' lightning channel. Other lightning users unrelated to the transaction cannot see anything going on as there is no 'public ledger' of lightning. however the receiver of the lightning funds can see the onchain transaction associated with the sending channel - the 'channel opening' transaction and therefore those 'utxos' have a history. in that way lightning is an improvement to privacy, but not a silver bullet. (that's my understanding)