Ephemeral Anchors and MEVil

That diagram doesn’t make sense to me: all the txs pay a non-zero fee, so presumably none of them have ephemeral anchor outputs?

I think in your scenario Alice wants to see TxA + TxB + TxD and Bob is creating TxC which conflicts with both TxB and TxD (the conflict with TxD being via some already confirmed utxo).

But I think in that case, the ephemeral anchor from TxA has to be less than 5 in value; otherwise a miner would prefer to just claim it directly via a 65byte OP_RETURN tx, rather than mine either TxB or TxC. Which means Bob’s TxC is already contributing 101 units of fees from elsewhere, and can just generate a conflict with TxD directly that will have both higher fee and higher feerate without interacting with TxA at all?