Defoliation

Just clean up any thing nasty and or blocking air flow and making hiding places for mold the bud site thing is more about redistributing new growth hormons amongst multiple tops buy putting them all at the same level

No you should not defoliate because all your buds are all nicely aligned seeing from the top view. You best defoliate and train before flower time and better not stress them in flower time. I think your plant looks awesome as it is. Yummie 👌

I am a believer in NOT defoliating, your plant looks healthy and lush, leave it to do its thing. Besides, she needs those leaves to make the energy she needs to grow her flowers! The flowers will grow out from under any leaves anyhow, making leaf removal pointless.

Ye, you really shouldn't at this stage. For autos I recommend doing any serious defol before pre flower starts But in your case, yeah, you need to defol brother. What you wanna do is go around the nodes, and say a bud site has 2-3 fan leafs or long sugar leafs you don't wanna remove more than 1/2 so start from the top a thin your canopy and leaf tuck where you can or pull nodes with LST into a better position (be careful not to break em) just lightly pull them to open up your canopy. And go up and down the node say half way down, no point removing leafs that are at the lowest as they aren't blocking bud sites and will only bring in energy. Just do some light defol don't go crazy. And leave a few fan leafs and take some sugar leafs also you'd be surprised at how much they block light as the bud moves down the from the top. I've had pretty good luck with doing light defol with autos. As you get more grows under you you'll know where to take them from before your plant even starts to flower and you won't even notice any defol when going through your pics after you remove the odd leaf here and there. Good luck. Good luck.

its early in flowering still so yeah you can defoliate with confidence. pluck the upper most leaves and leaves growing inwards. theyll grow back again in a week.