> about a coordinated effort to mint & publish some blocks without front-runners stealing all the work & claiming a big contract for themselves.

Wow, I have no idea how you read that really awesome article and concluded with such a response as this.

The article demonstrates how the authors were able to collaborate with miners to safely secure $9M worth of tokens due to a security vulnerability in a smart contract on a public blockchain where anyone could figure out the vulnerability and execute it before they could secure the funds.

Being upset that a miner is able to pick transactions that they want to include in their block demonstrates a clear lack of knowledge in how these distributed databases (blockchains) work and any critique similar to this can be disregarded.