Recently, everyone has been arguing again about which L2 has higher TPS, which is cheaper, and who offers better subsidies... To be honest, when congestion hits, your experience of waiting in the mempool is pretty much the same: first, you send it out thinking "submitted," but actually it just enters a waiting room, miners/ordering nodes pick and pack it, and if you set gas/fees too low, you sit on the sidelines. During this time, the price might also slip away. The most embarrassing part is you keep increasing the price, replacing, or canceling, and your mood gets dragged along with it.

I now treat it as a "practice": when you see pending for a long time, don’t get overly anxious and chase after it, first check if there’s something weird with the contract permissions, if the routing is going through strange pools, or if any wallet nearby is moving around... Anyway, better to miss out than to pay an emotional tax in congestion.