Just while eating a late-night snack, I glanced at the mempool.

When there's congestion, your transaction is really like waiting in line to buy milk tea:
first thrown into the pool to wait for miners/validators to pick,
if the fee is average, you just endure slowly;
someone adds a higher fee to cut in line, you move back...
you might even encounter the same transaction being replaced by your own higher fee (some replacements fail),
anyway, watching pending transactions and zoning out is pretty frustrating.
To put it simply, it's not "once sent, it's done," but "once sent, the bidding begins."

Sometimes I prefer to cancel and redo, rather than stuck all the time, especially with DeFi interactions,
when the price changes later, or the pool gets eaten by others first,
being stuck means paying slippage and emotional costs for nothing.
Recently, the fuss over NFT royalties is similar,
everyone wants to be prioritized to be "packed" into the deal:
creators want a cut, traders want smoother liquidity...
when congestion hits, whoever can afford the cost gets to go first.

Replying to what you said about "then I just give the highest fee forever..."
I usually don't either, it's too tiring.