I've been thinking a lot about the #meshtastic scalability problem of linear meshes, like the one in the image.

For context: A can't reach F because the default 3-hop limit. Increasing this number would help, but only until the mesh expands. A large city with a similar 'linear layout' wouldn't make it with just 7 hops.

Fortunately, since 2.7.18, the zero-hop rule applies to mutually fav'd CLIENT_BASE nodes as well, so that's the answer!

https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/pull/9168

Thanks @alec for the hint!