I too am a coder with over 20 years experience. Since LN is open source, could you point out the lines that request KYC? I have not seen any code that asks for this in the bitcoin core source and at present, the only way an address can be tracked is if it starts out on an exchange. But if you're never reusing addresses in your hardware wallet and you don't use wallet aggregation that combines funds to make a payment large enough, association of addresses becomes very tricky to establish.