During on-chain congestion, the transaction you send actually goes into the mempool queue: first broadcasted to nodes, "seen" by everyone, but miners/validators prioritize picking up transactions with higher fees. If you set your fee too low, it stays stuck, and can even be pushed further back by those willing to pay more later; to rescue it, you can only increase the fee to bump it up (some call this acceleration/replacement), or wait for it to expire or manually cancel. The most frustrating part is when it’s stuck "appearing as sent," but hasn't actually settled yet, which can really test your patience.

Recently, the community has been arguing whether the extreme funding rates are truly reversing or just continuing to inflate the bubble. I see it more as emotions pushing transactions into the mempool, rather than rational queuing: the more people bid higher to jump ahead, the more it’s ultimately you and me who pay for speed. Anyway, when there's congestion, I’d rather slow down than fight myself during the peak times.