The truth is that custodial nodes are popular.

The community likes to pretend it's just about ease of use in products/services or onboarding newbies until they have their own nodes. But that's not the truth. When the world hyperbitcoinizes your mom or her neighbor won't want to have their own node.

We have talked a lot about on-phone nodes and watchtowers and cloud setups with private keys on phone and many other theoretical setups. But none of ideas have become mainstream in the community yet.

I don't want to be negative because I'm sure this problem will for sure be solved. Electricity had unsolved engineering challenges when it was 15 years old, the steam engine was for sure not perfected when it was 5 years old. And Lightning is still young. Let's be patient and optimistic.