Could this potentially be tested by dating historic recombination events? Look for multiple ones at the same time? The detectable historic ones will also be between pretty divergent viruses.

Hard if there's too much recombination I guess.

Yeah, definitely a fascinating snapshot. I'd imagined seeing fewer crossovers. Maybe once you've got coinfection in a cell/ region going, it really kicks off, and the cell coinfection is the limiting factor. (incredibly long viral genome must help)

This is very cool. Would be intrigued to see how many mutations separate it from the nearest neighbour in the two clades for each tract. (Knowing very little about mpox diversity, it's hard to infer the strength of evidence for each recombination event, except for the 1nt blocks!)