Someone asked me, "Should retail investors study block builders, bundles, and such?"

I feel like, knowing only that "it will affect your transaction price" and "it's not the exchange screwing you over" is enough.
Basically, after you click swap, someone is packaging transactions in the middle; if the order changes, you might get front-run, or what could have been a successful trade turns into a slippage explosion.
What you really need to do isn't that complicated: don't aggressively trade in very thin pools, keep slippage small, try to use protected routing/private transactions (choose if you can), split large orders, and if it fails, don't get emotional and chase retries.
As for how they auction blocks or assemble bundles, that's the engineers' fun...
Recently, modularization and the DeFi layer narratives are heating up again, developers are talking excitedly, users look confused—I’m the same, anyway, the few operations that let me sleep well are those.
You say, "If I learn this, can I avoid all MEV"... hmm, overthinking it.