Very easy way to animate lightning in blender using a image of lightning with alpha. In this video you would work with keyframing and procedural tweaking values to animate the image for the final animation. This method is really simple and beginners can follow along very easily too. Also this is intended for optimising the lightning so that people with slow pc can also implement lightning effect in any project they're already working on.
Download lightning png : https://www.pngegg.com/en/png-xcfgc