I thought people will be more weary connecting to unknown nodes, but I realised that the protections built into the Bitcoin LN protocol are sufficiently strong that people are OK to take the chance.

Specifically, the risk is not about losing funds to a bad actor, but that your peer may be able to see the traffic on your channel, which may be used for traffic analysis. In other words, you don't want to connect to a spook.

To be realistic, the information they can gain is not that valuable, so the risk is pretty low.