Yes that's absolutely right, people's vision got clouded by the idea of earning routing fees in some Tor-adjacent cypher-fantasy.

Since Lightning is literally just payment channels, the best peers were always meant to be peers you have some form of extra-protocol economic relationship with. The channel graph would ideally resemble a web-of-trust.

This was really important in the very earliest days when implementations were very buggy, many cases of out-of-band cooperation on things like crashed nodes and force closing channels to help your peer recover.

This is one of many reasons we're laying Nostr into the node-side of things with Lightning.Pub, as a social and persistence layer for nodes.