What to do with the leaves? Let them grow or use a specific method to grow?

leave the leaves -- as best you can. overlapping leaves creates standing water -- probably a net positive to remove 1 when you see it. Light reaching lower areas is a good thing, but you generalyl get more bang for your buck hitting top leaves... still sometimes may be a good idea. or may not.. there is little to now research with suitable samples and suitable apples to apples comparison to be certain one of many other factors that varied between teh two samples influenced results. airflow is good for avoiding microbial growth (same reasons as the standing water above...) Less is more. LEaves produce the energy that powers growth. removing leaves reduces that overall energy potential. this is one thing where the anecdotal stuff should be ignored as it is way too fine of resolution to see with the naked eye and is mostly likely jsut what someoen did 1 time and ppl just mindlessly repeat it without ever verifying the inductively drawn conclusion. buds do not photosynthesize.. this is mostly likely a false positive when ppl say they think light hitting buds makes it less larfy... it's more likely becaue light is hitting the sugar leaves and leaves more local to that bud site.. has nothing to do with sex organs... does a male human's penis help you breathe? no it does not.. it has evolved and built for reproduction not respiration. while anything green on the plant can technically photosynthesize, it is either extremely attenuated (underside of leaves) or extremely limited due to concentration of chlorophyll -- enough to make it green but nothing compared to the anatomy of leaves. leave as much as you can... i take off too much but i am deathly afraid of WPM BWahahah. i try not to remove all leaves from any 1 growth node. i am systematic about how i remove them so there there is some pattern to the growth to avoid the same problem within a short period of time. e.g. i may go around top colas and remove the leaf on the right on each. maybe, alternate a node down from that etc etc.. removing leaves at top can exacerbate stretching* fyi... you keep pulling some off up top during flower stretch and it will stretch more than it normally would have. can be a good or bad thing... use it as a tool if you need a stretch, but don't mindlessly do it, eithe.

She's doing really well, isn't she! Good job so far! I would suggest you start to do some LST on her - gently pull the branches away from the main stem and secure them... if pliable enough, these can be pulled as much as 90-degrees but they need to be PLIABLE! There are LST clips you can buy and I love them - but I've also used soft strips of cloth and pin them to the fabric pots when I get the branches where I want them... others use pliable garden wire that's rubber coated... there are many different ways of doing this. LST will open up the plant and give much more light and air to the lower bud sites and you'll have a much better yield when it comes time for harvest. Good luck! Looking good!