"Similar to this" and making an example that was exactly like this makes it a bit difficult to answer.
I think the examples you come up with (LBL, Romandie, Dauphine and Hautacam) all have certain similarities to each other and that they looked a bit strange.
What I dont see is how yesterday are similar to these, because of how much stronger he was then everyone bar Pogacar in the end. If he yesterday had come back and then finished like 8th that would've been more similar to the previous examples, but yesterday was in my opinion completely different to these examples because he actually clearly was the second strongest in the race.
I would therefore say that yesterday is the first example of him being suddenly dropped and then actually fight back and dominate the field (minus Pogacar) and that it therefore was something completely different than what we saw on Hautacam, LBL etc.
I think comparing with Hautacam stage is good, because it highlights the massive differences:
- On Soulour he got dropped early and seemed to ride a steady pace the whole climb. On Mont Kigali he responded to Pogacars attack, as one of only 3-4 riders, was 2nd with 500 meters to go of the climb and then suddenly went out of the line and got passed by 20-25 riders.
- On Hautacam stage he fought back but just from the bottom of Hautacam he did his own pace, meaning that the Hautacam stage was like a 55km long steady effort. Yesterday he rode the last part of Mount Kigali and the Mur de Kigali (and the parts in between and just after the Mur) slow and lost a lot of time there. Then after the second bike change he rode the final laps much, much faster than he rode in that section from Mount Kigali to the second bike change. Too me that shows that on Hautacam stage he rode the whole thing more or less as hard as he could, he just wasnt good enough that day while yesterday he rode a long part of the race way slower than he could've done as he proved to be much faster again in the last 60k.
- On Hautacam stage he got dropped by riders like THJ and Vaquelin, yesterday he dropped much better riders. That's a massive difference.
I think that for many of the races previous this year it's been a good reason to ask the question "what the F actually happened here?", because what happened at LBL, Romandie, Hautacam etc in some form definitiviely looks strange, but yesterday I think it's pretty obvious that the mechanical on the first bike definitiviely was the reason for what happened to him on Mount Kigali and Mur de Kigali, because of how he raced in the end.