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I came across MEV in this reddit posted by Flexpool (i think) because Flexpool was claiming MEV was a big improvement and good for miners.
The close I could get to an explanation is that there are traders trying to do fast trades. So they pay extra to a pool to get higher priority and MEV is a way to pass that payment on to miners.
From the paper Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges
MEV (miner-extractable value) refers to the total amount of Ether miners can extract from manipulation of transactions within a given timeframe, which may include multiple blocks’ worth of transactions.
It includes techniques like: front running, arbitrage, liquidations, transaction reordering, etc. Only miners have the possibility of reordering transactions but any user can apply others methodologies. It is not something exclusive to miners.
It is an area with increasing research. Take a look at some statistics https://explore.flashbots.net/.
