This makes sense to me. The implication seems to be that only a few large stackers will be able to be sovereign. Everyone else will be hodling in some form of custodial system. 

I’m optimistic that the community will eventually figure out a better and more decentralized layer. 

 Yeah, we're just going to need soft forks most likely 

 is lightning decentralized though? 

 yes, of course it is. we have a strict decentralization verification process. 

we guarantee decentralization by having every LN transaction’s route be chosen by a single server, kept in a closet at your mom’s house o.O 

 A paper from 2020 co-authored by Christian Decker shared that 10% nodes hold 80% liquidity:

LN: A second path towards centralization of the bitcoin economy - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.02819.pdf

Liquidity in 2024: https://mempool.space/lightning/nodes/rankings/liquidity

Maybe someone could write another paper with present stats including use of custodial wallets 

 the beauty of the LN protocol is that you actually can be the decentralization you want to see in the world, by running your own node