Actually you didn't pay attention to the prerequisite accompanied OP's scenarios. He clearly said "lets say the fee rate is the same in both scenarios." Besides. no one right minded would not consolidate to "into an exchange " . Thus, I'm sorry, but you speculations have no sense. Answers which highlights the second scenario as the cheapest one are accurate.
I did. No need to apologise, you might've misunderstood me. I didn't make the assumption between making transactions of different periods, and thereby differentfee markets.
We usually consolidate UTXOs periodically when fees are low, and hence you gain an advantage in the future; you avoid paying a higher fee in the future when fees are high. Sure, that'll make sense if and only if you expect the benefits for adding another transaction to be lower than that just being able to spend an entire UTXO in its entirety and thereby making it a 1 input to 2 output transactions in the future. As much as we should provide general advice, I'm thinking of a different scenario where it can be applicable to some.
Let's say I have 20 x 0.01 BTC UTXOs, periodic payments, service payments, etc. Then I want to pay another person 0.01BTC, or 0.05BTC periodically, let's say per month.
Would it make sense for me to do a consolidation with:
20 inputs -> 1 UTXO, and then 1 input -> 2 UTXOs over another 4 transactions.
(1402+(141*4)) = 1966
Or
5 inputs -> 1 or 2 UTXOs 4 times
(412*4) = 1648
Note that I'm not invalidating the advice given, I even suggested that the second transaction could be better in general. It'll be important to understand someone's spending habits as well. I don't see any harm trying to understand if OP can possibly predict and estimate their spending behaviors over the long run.