Im still fairly new to mining/crypto and such, so im trying to wrap my head around the options here.

Recently ethermine changed their payouts, i guess to include a gas fee on payouts (my threshold is 0.1 currently and 40 gwei)

I mine about 0.1 every 5 days.. so far im on day 7 and the last payout hasnt occurred because the threshold preset to 40 hasnt gone low enough.

I think thats roughly 0.0001 or maybe 0.00001 eth or more, unsure on the fee.  As of now i'm sending it to exodus, though ultimately i need to employ a ledger i havent used yet and eventually i think ill send this straight to coinbase exchange for auto selling. (i dont think you can send partial on payout to do a split or i would)

From what i read, i could use "metamask" , something about restoring my phrase from exodus to metamask and then going to the dashboard on ethermine and connecting to the metamask wallet and setting it for L2?  This would avoid gas fees.  I dont quite understand this process, or if it really saves that much in doing so?

Are there alternative options given the above?  Or maybe just switching to a different pool provider?  Any opinions on using metamask, risky, safe, effective etc?

Thanks in advance