Personally I would strip those little lower leaves/nodes. they aren’t gonna grow into anything valuable unless you cut the stem directly above them.
If you want it to branch out more then you could top it like Jjgrow said. That will force the side branches to get longer and might even make them produce extra branches since the apical dominance was changed.
I don’t like super bushy plants. They are a pain to trim and usually they don’t yield any more than having a few main tops. The yield usually just gets spread out into many small buds instead of a few large buds.