Bitcoin transaction fees have gotten so out of hand that it has almost touched 521 sat/vB as of today, some exchanges have increased their withdrawal fees due to this congested network.
Why do I say that, because I to do DCA every week always go through the exchange to buy bitcoin and then move it to a non-custodial wallet for further security, but in the last few weeks it has become a hindrance because I cannot withdraw BTC on the exchange for no reason because of the high fees that make me a burden and it's a shame if I have to charge tens of dollars in withdrawal fees, maybe as a temporary consideration I will keep it on the exchange for a while until the network returns to normal to withdraw it back.
I don't make large purchases of bitcoin, but with a few dollars spent it still means something to us if it is cumulative every week.
The most important thing is that I have pocketed bitcoins in my personal wallet for the long term and this is safe enough, while bitcoins on exchanges are around 15% of the total portfolio.
We may well need to adapt our practices to the current situation, and I know that there have been many members who are so scared of keeping any level of value on exchanges, and personally, I think that we need to attempt to be practical about the matter rather than having a rule that might not work so well, especially for guys who are buying low quantities of bitcoin, and I personally think that if you are creating UTXOs of less than $100, then you are likely putting yourself into potentially uncomfortable positions, whether in the future or even under current circumstances. There may well be a lot of forum members who had been transferring way less than $100 at a time, and what are they going to do in times like this if they need to send their bitcoin, and then maybe drawing from several addresses at the same time, then each address (utxo) has a fee, so it can add up, and it might not even be economically feasible to spend from the lower value addresses, even if you are wanting to send a larger amount that has to combine several UTXOs in order to reach the send amount.
Maybe there are going to be solutions in the future to spend from the smaller value locations, and sometimes the price of bitcoin could go up by so much, so it makes the UTXOs more valuable in terms of dollars, but I am not going to proclaim if there are going to be solutions for the folks who have a bunch of UTXOs with small values in them... and by the way, there might even be times in the future that $100 is not a high enough value to have in a UTXO, and it may even be the case right now that if someone has to spend $20 to $50 for transaction fees, then it might not make much sense to be sending transactions that are worth less than $1k or so, so it might make even more sense for those guys buying $10 per week, to keep their value on an exchange until it reaches somewhere between $500 and $1k, even if it might take them a year to get to that amount, and surely guys have to make decisions regarding balancing how much they want to have on exchanges, and also sometimes there are going to be periods in which the transaction fees are lower, and there could be attempts to time the transfer for those lower transaction fee periods, as you mentioned salad daging.