Block-pending attack where miners get a head start on resolving the next block

I believe what you are describing is known as a “self-mining” attack. This is not a “block evasion” attack in the usual sense, although there are obvious similarities.

selfish mining

In theory

There seem to be many academic papers on this topic.

As Techopedia explains:

In essence, a selfish mining attack is accomplished by withholding the broadcast of newly mined blocks to the public network. By doing so, these miners can secretly continue mining subsequent blocks, giving them a head start and increasing their chances of adding more blocks to the chain.
…
The concept of selfish mining was already theorized in 2010, but was elucidated in a paper by Cornell University researchers Eyal and Sirer.

actually

Research has been conducted to detect this. Example: Li, SN., Campajola, C. & Tessone, CJ Statistical detection of selfish mining in proof-of-work blockchain systems. Sci Rep 14, 6251 (2024).

We propose a statistical test to analyze the behavior of each miner in five popular cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monacoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash. Our method is based on the recognition that selfish mining behavior causes discernible anomalies in the statistics of miners’ successive block discoveries. We then apply heuristic-based address clustering to improve the detectability of this type of behavior. We found a significant presence of anomalous miners in Monacoin, Bitcoin Cash, and to a lesser extent Ethereum.

This suggests that there may have been nothing clear What has happened with Bitcoin in the 14 years since this issue was first discussed.