Illustration of the physical picture discussed in Sect. 5.1. Left: LyC photons escape through channels covered by cm⁻², while H I clouds with larger than 10¹⁸ cm⁻² efficiently absorb the ionizing flux that passes through them. The ISM is ionization bounded such that the escape of ionizing photons is directly proportional to the fraction of low column density paths (1-C_f(H I)) and to the dust attenuation within or in front of these channels (we chose to exclude dust from this illustration because its spatial distribution is still unknown). This physical model likely describes the escape of ionizing photons from the low LCEs of our sample. Right: LyC photons escape because there is a higher fraction of low column density channels and because the densest H I clouds do not efficiently absorb LyC photons ( cm⁻²). All the sightlines towards the observer are density-bounded such that the f_esc(LyC) cannot be inferred only using the measured C_f(H I). Our work suggests that this physical picture explains the escape of LyC photons in the large LCEs (38, 46 and 73%) of our sample.