Growing up learning to drive on the East Coast, my intuition finds a sweet spot between the two, typically merging while moving slowly when there is a natural g

Growing up learning to drive on the East Coast, my intuition finds a sweet spot between the two, typically merging while moving slowly when there is a natural gap between cars. What I tend to see instead is hard braking ripple back down the line to a half-dozen cars or more for each car trying to merge right at the end because suddenly there are two cars right next to each other and one lane of car width left. Every time it appears that the lane-ending driver is like "oh wow, my lane went away!"