I guess the take away here is that if you have the right connections then you can bypass the system.
It's just that some subset of valid transactions are exploiting vulnerabilities in poorly written contracts. In this case, you want to make dead sure that your "good" exploit runs first.
This is not usual.
I agree. Due to specialized compute taking over mining and economies of scale most cryptocurrencies don't do what they say and are manipulated by their big pools (like this) consistently.