Who the fuck cares about loot at lowbie levels, just race to 50 and do shit with proper rewards.
If there are a number of potentially good locations and none of them are that much better or worse, going to the place that drops immediately useful gear is going to give you an advantage. Also a number of places where loot is so bad you can actually hamstring yourself - mages, necros, druids, and shaman have a bit of expense to getting all their good spells.
For example 1, if you go to sol a at 20 and grind kobolds for a few levels and then king/bar for a few, the zem is as good as it gets and you can walk away with necessary drops for cleric, mage, necro. If you instead have a few melee in the group and so spend some of your 20s in runnyeye, the zem is a bit worse... but if your tank and ranger get babs/bals it can mean your dps is dramatically better for a few dozen levels.
For example 2, if you kill a bunch of gfay garbage which is mostly crap besides orcs and then take the spires to luclin and do paludal phlargs until 20ish and then move on to HSM and kill owls or wolves because the grimlings (closest/natural spot leaving PC) are camped.. you won't be buying jack shit. Same for a route like sro crocs and some kunark safaris. You will end up level 30 with a combined maybe dozen total plat to buy spells for the whole group and tarnished weapons. If you instead leave paludal the other direction for say echo or nl, or go to oot or uguk instead of crocs, or do giants or goblins instead of roaming animals in kunark, you likely don't lose much xp rate (if any) but multiply how much plat you make.
There is a balance between how much you just hunker down and slaughter vs how much you want items to help you then kill faster, run more to then have a better spot, etc. The faster the xp rate the more important it is to get SOME plat while leveling, but the less valuable it is to waste time traveling and much less to get gear you will replace soon. When xp is a slog, you get plenty for spells almost anywhere but you want a premium camp spot since you will probably be there for a half dozen hours, so whats a half hour to travel there in the grand scheme, versus fast xp where you could almost outlevel your "grass is greener" camp where you are in the time it takes to wait for things like nexus spires to fire.