With bid bots being rampant and mostly pretty dumb there were many front running strategies that made sense, including even front running the front runners.

_To the extent that the later and larger votes are more intelligent and useful_ (and are also balanced by downvotes when they are not), the earlier votes are doing what they are supposed to do, or they don't earn (much)

(italics in the above my addition)

That's an important qualification. At this moment, however, front running anything voted with much voting power downvoted or not, makes a lot of financial sense.

@theycallmedan made an excellent post about how Trending should be populated by the best organically popular content on Steem to draw eyeballs and that bid bots and trending that buying votes to put anything to Trending should never have direct positive ROI. It should always cost money to do so. That makes sense. Promoted content (basically advertisements) should make up a distinct minority of the content in Trending for trending to have any value.

However, it is still very profitable for anyone to front run the bid bots whether or not the posts the votes are bought for make a positive ROI or not. That's because the posts would still be valuable and because predicting a large bid bot vote is very easy as all bid bot votes are preceded by a bid.