Just plugged in my phone charger and looked on the chain to be educated by a swap again... You think you've caught an arbitrage opportunity, but often you're just giving others a fee.

The concept of a sandwich, frankly, is: at the moment you place an order, someone else looks at you in the mempool first, then uses a faster/more expensive method to jump the queue, turning your slippage into their profit margin.
What you see is a "price difference," but what they see is a "withdrawable slippage budget."

Recently, new L1/L2 projects are offering incentives to attract TVL, and old users complain about "mining, extracting, selling." I can really empathize: when liquidity heats up, MEV also heats up, and retail traders manually clicking a couple of times become fuel.
Anyway, what I’m doing now is: set limit orders when possible, don’t give too much slippage; split small amounts, choose pools with deep liquidity, and if it really doesn’t work out, don’t chase that one opportunity.
Of course, there are opportunities, but first ask yourself: is this piece of meat for you to eat, or for you to be eaten?