The title of this is a bit misleading, it implies that there's only one way to be non-custodial on mobile. This is not only untrue, its arguably the way that makes all of the worst trade-offs. It's these same bad trade-offs that cause the bulk of users default to WoS, and create a bad reputation for Lightning's UX and centralization.

Tunneling wallets on the other hand have been around longer than mobile nodes, and they both work and scale much better. Traditional web architecture however has been the bottleneck to on-boarding here. Things like static IP4 addresses, SSL certificates etc, have kept a lot of otherwise would-be node-runners on the sidelines.

What's the point of running a node if it's a nightmare trying to connect anything to it?

Well, it turns out that trying to shoehorn a node onto a phone is a heck of a lot more difficult than just having real nodes tunnel out.

We tried solving this with GUN before, but it's relays weren't simple enough. Lightning Labs iterated on that with with LNC/Aperture, which is hands-down best way to use Zeus.

Nostr now is the pivotal 3rd gen solution, by providing a web-native overlay network that solves the node connectivity and sharing problems. Like NWC but on steroids, while running a real online node.

The internet is undefeated at requiring things be online to work, that's just the nature of it. Mobile nodes ignore this at great peril. There's scalability issues here too, and we already see some mobile node wallets bail out to centralizing custodial "Federations" as a soft-pivot from these failures.

Most of challenges in the article are self-inflicted.