It seems that the biggest impact of "queue jumping" on the chain isn't from the whales, but from people like us making one or two small transactions: during the same swap/mint/liquidation, if someone throws in a little extra tip, they can push you to the back of the line. You either pay more gas, or suffer from slippage and get filled completely, and the most embarrassing part is thinking you were just slow. Basically, whoever controls the ordering rights can decide what "fairness" looks like.

Recently, there's been a debate about modularization and the data availability layer, developers are excited, but users are completely confused... For someone like me who considers costs, no matter how the underlying is broken down, in the end, it all comes down to the trading experience: can I avoid being squeezed out, reordered, or paying unnecessary fees? If account abstraction/packagers just hide the fees better but queue jumping still happens, that's pretty frustrating. Anyway, I now split large transactions into batches, and for small ones, I just wait until there's less congestion before submitting.