I think that I'll go the CLN route too. It's disappointing that the channels can't be really carried over from the retiring node. A fresh start it is. I've got an old NUC with a weak processor (Celeron N3060) with a 1TB SSD and 8GB. I didn't want to junk this, or upgrade it, so I've tasked it solely with running the bitcoin-core daemon. It could chug along for another 3 years yet and do it comfortably. Other stuff can go on the more-powerful node. electrs, CLN, mempool can go there and make RPCs to the bitcoin-core daemon. And it'll leave me with space for Immich, Nextcloud, Transmission-OpenVPN, Pi-hole, Plex, etc.