I'm surprised at your incredulity, doesn't almost every commercial activity have taxes/regulation structures that favor the largest businesses? And don't the largest business simply pay any onerous costs of business, then leverage the tax system in (sometimes unrelated) ways to claim it all back?
Some large companies claim so much tax back that they end up getting a net negative tax bill, i.e. the government is paying them to stay in business (and that's before counting any explicit subsidies)
I'm pretty sure there's plenty of sectors where economics of scale have greater importance than favourable regulation, though admittedly that might only apply to sectors that are too small for corporate lobbyists to bother.
That being said, I agree with your assessment in principle, but I don't see how this would apply to LN in practice.
While it's relatively easy to regulate exchanges; tricky, but still possible to regulate mining to a degree, it would be imho impossible to regulate LN nodes in a meaningful way. They're just too easy to spin up and keep running in a nearly untraceable manner. And the capital requirements are close to zero since the main asset required -- ie. Bitcoin -- can be easily redeployed without deprecation. Transaction fees for opening and closing channels notwithstanding. The same can't be said for mining hardware or even the code that exchanges are running on.
The way I see it LN nodes are simply decoupled enough from the classical economy as to be impacted by regulation (short of shutting down the internet). They are decoupled from the fiat system and have only negligible infrastructure requirements causing them to be effectively decoupled from physical locations as well. The first mainly affects exchanges, the latter miners. Both apply to pretty much every traditional business venture. One outlier I can think of are online Casinos that only run on cryptocurrencies. But while these are similarily decoupled from the fiat system and physical requirements, they require much more effort to run smoothly and more importantly they require trust, which for routing payments via the Lightning Network is irrelevant.
I might be missing something but the way I see it Lightning Node operators are in a unique position. Except, of course, there's only limited money to be made.