Does the order of steps in the History panel make any difference to the end result?

The answer is an emphatic No. Lightroom edits do not build on one another – the current slider values in the right hand panel are all that matters.

If you don’t quite believe this, save the edits back to xmp and remove the image from the catalogue. Reimport it and there’ll be no History – but the image will look identical to before.

The History panel is more like a log of what you’ve done – an audit trail – and I’ve long thought Adobe could have used a different term, like “log”, to clearly distinguish it from Photoshop’s History feature, where the exact order of work does often matter.

Of course, it is not merely a log. One nice touch is when you’re in Before/After view (Y) you can drag history steps into the Before view.