Recently, I've seen people watching large on-chain transfers and hot/cold wallets on exchanges, shouting "Smart money is coming" whenever there's movement.

Honestly, I'm more concerned: if this money is cross-chain, who do we actually trust in the middle...
To put it simply, a cross-chain transfer is just "moving the state/message from chain A to chain B."
You have to trust that the sending chain won't roll back, trust that the relayer/transmitter is willing to forward without messing around, trust the verification system (light clients/multisig/oracles) isn't broken, and finally, trust that the deployed contract/module on the destination chain isn't poorly written.
IBC sounds very "fundamentalist," and I thought that verifying with a light client means you don't have to trust anyone.
But in practice, it still requires trusting the consensus of the other chain + the client implementation to be bug-free, and someone has to help deliver the packet.
If they don't deliver it, you're just left staring blankly...
Anyway, I now look at bridges not by who has the loudest voice, but by understanding what trust assumptions I am actually making.
Every cross-chain transfer is like adding an extra layer of risk through multisig.