Hasn't LEO adopted an early form of this where they would let accounts from ETH still use LeoFinance without an actual Hive account and just publish from their own account?
You can create a Hive account with an ETH signature, but the Hive account still gets created.
It really depends how you are defining "Lite Account".
So far, all "Lite Accounts" are on layer one and are just regular Hive accounts that someone else controls.
In essence, this doesn't reduce the number of Hive accounts created, it increases it by making account creation more accessible.
I wasn't sure how they were doing it. I assumed they were just using some LEO based nym like @leoauthors and funding it with enough HP to cover the RC needs then processing payout rewards straight to the associated wallet address in b/wLEO post conversion. I haven't kept up well with the projects but see headlines and just assumed how things were being done.
I'm referring to light accounts as what @howo described as allowing people to own and pay with hive way more easily. I can't remember where I read it but my understanding is these would essentially be wallet addresses like Bitcoin addresses that would be cryptographically generated and thus be limitless in nature. Those accounts could then store Hive in them and transact but wouldn't be able to publish or use RCs beyond the free transaction limits.
If that were the case then dapps could still accept publications from any of these light address to be stored within their own database. Then as desired people with access to that database could publish the content to the Hive blockchain while still giving beneficiary status to the light account for any rewards earned.