I'm curious about what made you reach that understanding. My guess is that you either tried or heard from someone who tried to open channels with some LN giant

I'm curious about what made you reach that understanding. My guess is that you either tried or heard from someone who tried to open channels with some LN giant like Bitrefill. You shouldn't do that. Big channel operators don't want to dilute their liquidity with unreliable small channels. You should instead establish a channel to a smaller node that may be directly or indirectly connected to that merchant. LN is all about routing. Also in the thread's context we are talking about Visa and Mastercard banning merchants right? In a scenario where the LN is widely adopted that merchant can setup and run BTCPayServer (https://btcpayserver.org https://btcpayserver.org) to maintain his own independent LN or on chain payment process system. As for users, there has been work to facilitate nodeless operation on software wallets. Probably based on https://github.com/lightninglabs/neutrino https://github.com/lightninglabs/neutrino. I know Blue Wallet is building something based on a lightweight LN node so people can establish channels from their personal wallets (https://github.com/BlueWallet/rn-ldk https://github.com/BlueWallet/rn-ldk). There is an Android exclusive wallet that (https://lightning-wallet.com https://lightning-wallet.com) can do that and Muun (https://muun.com https://muun.com) is doing some smart tricks to provide nodeless and custodial LN experience.