Justin! Thanks for going on yet another Query Quest despite going on so many already. It's always neat to see how you put your own spin on the calls for testing. I love what you ended up with.

The two primary issues I ran into were with the “read more” link and spacing.

I'm honestly surprised I didn't run into the Read More link issue while testing but I kept changing the text! If you change the text, the link does appear which tells me that the "Read more..." is likely a very unclear placeholder. In any case, this was discovered by someone else previously and I added your feedback along with my observations to the issue:

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/29168

As for the general spacing feedback, I very much agree. This continues to come up repeatedly in testing. I expect to see continued iterations to improve consistency here along with solutions like a Browse Mode or Preview option to help limit any necessary context switching.