If someone is buying less than 20$... go custodial. Wallet of Satoshi or CoinOS. Up to 50$ maybe custodial but at these fee rates 50k sats is OK.

At 100k sats definitely hold the UTXO... if Bitcoin 'goes up' the appreciation will hopefully pay for the transaction fee. If it 'goes down' the on-chain fees will be lower anyway.

Stacking 200k to 500k UTXOs is good for most people... then when they have 500k-1mil sats they can combine some. Yes there are privacy compromises but nothing is perfect. CoinJoins can also be very economical and provide a good spread of UTXO sizes for the accumulated 'chunks' and add a tremendous amount of privacy.

On the other hand, stacking into a Lightning channel works too... I recommend purchasing a channel ie from Zeus or Phoenix on their app... and buying non-kyc right into the channel providing invoices. You can 'pick' the size of the channel and the duration you need it for... that way you can balance cost with size and duration (heh). One 20-30$ 'setup fee' to get a 1mil sat channel is a great deal imo because you can buy over Lightning and avoid all fees until you either close the channel (later) or swap out of the channel to on-chain at like .5% fee per swap.

Someone may not want to pay 20-30$ initially to rent a channel on phoenix or Zeus ... but if they don't want to pay 20$ I don't know what to tell them maybe go custodial anyway? That way they can learn more about Bitcoin which is the important thing (education).

Like someone else pointed out there is no 'free lunch' and if you want Bitcoin like with anything else you have to pay for it. Great discussion.