I've been asked recently, "Isn't the blockchain open and transparent? How come I see that this address just moved funds, but I didn't see it on my end?"

To put it simply, what you see as "on-chain" is actually a picture assembled by your node/RPC/indexer.
They queue, cache, replay, and sometimes even choose different fork perspectives.
So, for the same transaction, it's not unusual for the browser to display it first, and the wallet to notify later, or vice versa.
Especially across L2s and bridges, confirmation, accounting, and index updates are fundamentally out of sync.

The NFT royalty disputes are quite similar: everyone argues over the "display" and "settlement" in the secondary market, but the real misunderstanding often starts with how the underlying infrastructure fetches data and attributes it.

I treat complexity as an enemy:
The fewer middle layers I trust, the better.
Anyway, being a little slower is better than misreading.