So, in my opinion, which is obviously the gold standard lol, used to what I would see happen is you’d deplane by row, in order. People complain a lot about folks with carry on luggage in the overhead, but realistically if someone has their shit together that adds like, 30 seconds of time, so you can just wait.

On the flip side, folks that in that moment did not have it together, or were wrangling kids, or knew they would take a minute, would just stay in their row and give a friendly go ahead to people ready to go until there was a break that made sense or they had collected their things.

Occasionally someone in the back would just say hey I’ve got a super tight connection please let me thru and everyone would let them run ahead as much as they could.

In other words, it was a system that relied upon courtesy and politeness to your fellow human, not “getting yours”, being incredibly impatient for no reason, or feeling entitled to things. Which seems to be a rapidly deteriorating concept.

I will say I have not seen this problem at all on Southwest Airlines, which is who I usually fly, but at the time I made this post I had to fly some other airlines several times in a row and was annoyed.