Additional context on the waste: gas fees are not only charged to those who have successfully minted an NFT - so those paying ~$5,500 worth of ApeCoin for the NFT plus ~$2,000 - $6,000 worth of ETH for the gas fee.

If a mint is failed because of the wallet ran out of ETH, those people lose all their ETH and get nothing in return. An outlier, but this how this person lost $6,900 of ETH to get nothing in return [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/existentialenso/status/15205751405636649...