Thanks Nate! Super helpful answer - I think I've got it figured out now :)

Thanks for the awesome answer Nate!! Just adding one awesome point mentioned by Jaime Ortega - be sure to be careful when you change your own gas prices!

If the transaction you're trying to execute is time sensitive - for instance, if you're trying to mint a new in demand NFT project or trying to buy an NFT off a secondary marketplace like OpenSea and trades are happening quickly for the NFT collection you're buying, you probably shouldn't try to set your gas prices lower than the going rate - in all likelihood, that just means that by the time your transaction goes through hours later, the project will have already minted out or someone else will have bought the NFT you were trying to buy, and your transaction will not only just fail to complete, but also still consume gas and cost you money for the gas consumed!

So be sure to only lower gas prices for non-time sensitive transactions that you're confident will still succeed when it goes through at a later time. Almost all transactions are not urgently time sensitive - for example, sending Ether from one address to another, or transferring an NFT from one address or another, or staking your crypto or NFTs, or depositing or withdrawing your funds to and from DeFi protocols, exchanges, yield farms, liquidity pools, and so forth, so saving money by lowering gas prices is ideal for these kinds of transactions.

For time sensitive transactions like very hyped mints that will likely sell out very quickly, you actually probably want to increase your gas prices far above the current going price of gas to ensure that even if a gas war occurs and gas spikes super high with a lot of people competing to mint, your transaction will still go through.

To do this, just do the opposite of what was suggested above - set your Max Fee to as high as you're willing to pay - say, 1000 or 5000 gwei, depending on how much you're willing to shell out for the transaction in question to go through no matter what and how much competition you think there will be, and your priority fee to something high as well, say 100-1000.

Keep in mind that you won't necessarily pay the max fee you set - that's just as the terminology says, the max fee. You will, however, always pay the priority fee you set - that's the 'tip', so to speak, that you promise to the miner who includes your transaction in a given blockchain block for doing so, whereas the rest of the max fee besides the priority fee that you specify is just the base going fee for gas that is determined by the network itself and burned. If the going base fee for gas is lower than the max fee you set, you'll only pay the going base fee + priority fee for your transaction - so feel free to set the max fee ultra high without worrying that you're going to unnecessarily waste money on gas - you'll only pay exactly what was needed in order to get your transaction through at the point in time when it goes through!