Any non-trivial distributed system will exhibit pathological feedback loops due to random events throughout the system synchronizing on each other and interacting in strange ways. It is a very common design problem for parallel systems. It manifests as suboptimal throughput in the best cases and total meltdown in the worst.

The "cost" of a message operation is not fixed, and pathological operations are much more expensive by definition, so always selecting the least expensive operation that can be run at any point in time from the perspective of the node maximizes the aggregate throughput of the system. Of course, it also has the side effect of applying negative feedback to pathological positive feedback loops.

This is actually a mathematics consequence, so there are limited workarounds. Nor is it intuitive. Making parts of the system slower, with no other changes, can increase the aggregate throughput of the distributed system. For non-trivial distributed systems, you are unlikely to produce a robustly optimal design by accident.