Funds were returned without any itervention, so all is over, but I started to have a serious doubts what to do in situations like that. At the end you transfer your coins somewhere and must believe they are safe.
No need to worry and no need for 'trust' either (since you mentioned this word earlier).Worst-case, you unilaterally close the channel. I do believe channel partners are even punished a little, for disappearing and requiring such a force close.
But it's true that it would be annoying if channel partners were to do this all the time and you'd be constantly stuck with channel closing transactions waiting to be spendable.
As an example, think of all the people in Cuba, Florida, and anyplace else that was just fucked up by Hurricane Ian. If you were running a node at home, or in your business, you stand a good chance of being offline for weeks now. If I had a channel open to someone there, and there is really no way for me to know where you actually are, I could wait a week before deciding to do a force close, and then be waiting 'x' number of blocks / time for that to actually occur. Through no fault of mine.
That's true; it's how the Lightning Network is designed. So that you're always guaranteed to get your funds back out, even though it may take a while.The only risk in such a scenario is that if you knew for certain that the channel partner is going to be offline for a while and that they have no way of restoring a node backup on an AWS instance or don't have a watchtower set up, you could attempt cheating on them.
But for you, there is no risk (referring back to the terms 'security' and 'trust') here other than losing 'time' / opportunity cost to do something else with those funds during that time.
