Defoliation help

This is my first plant and my first post on this forum. I was hoping to get advice on how to prune/defoliate my northern lights fem plant. So the plants back story is its growing in a 2x2 space in a 3 gallon pot and its now a foot tall, and just started stretching having been just switched over to flowering light schedule.

The plant is 8 weeks old and up until now had grown pretty slowly. Just before flowering I had to fix a nutrient lock out due to either over liming or too hot of soil. I ended up re-potting twice to fix the lime problem and flushing due to the ppms being over 4,000. Now, the plant seems to be healthy again, no more leaf problems and everythings looking bright, perky and its growing well again.

I may have over trained the plant for its genetics, I topped at 7 nodes, removed the first node, and bent it over, that gives it 12 colas. As its grown, i trained the colas out from the center. At this point its about filled the tent, which i was kind of aiming for, but they are more crowded then I had wanted.

With all of that out of the way, I'll get to my question. I plan to continue defoliating, but have only touched fan/growth leaves at this point, most of the lower nodes have had their growth leaves removed and just have small shoot leaves. I had also removed the first 2 node sites from all colas earlier on, at this point most of the colas have about 10 or 11 nodes, the oldest of which are less than an inch apart and the newest closing in on 2 inches apart. I think all the videos I've watched on defoliating i see people only mentioning growth leaves, but Im noticing that some of the higher nodes on my stronger colas are growing long lateral shoots themselves that are reaching toward the light. I don't really know what to do with these shoots.
Should I remove these shoots, or maybe top them after 1 node to limit their growth? Also, Ive been slowly removing all the lower growth leaves as the plants grown up and filled out more and more. Is this ok to do or is it compromising the lower nodes abilities to produce bud. Ive kind of been trying to imitate videos Ive seen with the intention of keeping the plant more open, allowing the plant to feel less crowded and get better light penetration. Like I said, Ive got 12 colas on a bushy plant thats almost filled its growth space with a relatively flat canopy, just trying to keep it a bit more open and keep the growth focused in the right places. Advice is much appreciated.