Reading Monuments By Risk, Not By Loot
Every monument has a loot rating and a risk rating, and they are not the same number. Sort them by risk and your first hour stops ending in a respawn.
New players pick monuments by what drops there. Experienced players pick by how likely they are to leave with it.
Sort monuments into three tiers of your own. Tier one is what you can clear alone, unarmed or nearly so, with more than one way out — the small roadside monuments and the lighthouses. Tier two needs a weapon and a plan, and usually has one obvious entrance everyone watches. Tier three needs radiation protection, a real gun and, honestly, a second player. The mistake is not visiting a hard monument; it is visiting it on the way home with a full bag.
Run your loop in ascending order, and set a bank point in the middle. Clear two tier-one stops, bank, then decide from what you have whether tier two is worth it. Deciding in advance is how you avoid the sunk-cost walk into a monument you already know is camped.
Read the traffic, too. A monument with fresh corpses and open crates has someone in it or just leaving. A monument with every crate unlooted at hour three of a wipe is not lucky, it is bait, or it is far from spawns and you should note why. Keep a mental map of which monuments on the current map are close to the big road junctions; those are the ones that stay contested all wipe, and the ones to visit early or not at all.