After the first few months of everyone getting updates almost at the same time, now it's back to scattershot updates.
I wouldn't call it scatter shot. The carriers are responsible for their specific "locked" devices. Samsung takes care of the rest. When I had my S22 Ultra (Verizon "locked"), I would get updated about a week or two before my daughter's unlocked S22 on Verizon got the update.
The first few updates that came out for the S24 phones, were big fix issues, like display saturation and camera fixes. Now that the really big fixes are done, it seems to be reverting back to the usual pace. The carriers update their devices first with the unlocked devices following in a week or so.