Looks like there's been another directorial shuffle going by the credits. Kohei Kureta seems to have stepped down from his co-series director position and has been replaced by Yasunori Koyama (so now the lineup is Satoshi Ito, Koyama, and Nagamine). That's a bit disappointing since I had gotten the impression that he was being groomed for the main series director position once Nagamine inevitably gets rotated out, but Koyama's going to be an excellent successor and I hope Kureta still sticks around as part of the episode director roster.
Definitely entering another "valley" stretch after the titanic 1026-1028 stretch and honestly I'm not really fond of these few manga chapters since it's obviously Oda realizing he wrote himself into a corner by pitting Usopp and Nami up against opponents who should be able to effortlessly flatten them. So expectations are set low until we hit the end of the Vol. 100 content and any bursts of inspired directing and animation, which this episode did have a few of, is just gravy. After the massive amount of work that Tomita put into the Whole Cake Island arc it feels very appropriate that he got to animate Big Mom's Page One takedown at the end of the episode.