I recently read that there are over 100k active full nodes, which is great, but more the more the merrier right?
I ran Bitcoin Core around 2018 for fun and to play around with the json-rpc api, but turned it off a bit later because of the storage requirements. A couple days ago I found an old hard drive lying around so I hooked it up to my desktop and I'm running a full node again! No plans to turn it off, since I'm going to be upgrading my computer and I have enough btc to feel like I should participate in the network.
But really what we need is low-cost, low-energy miners, to widely disperse the 'consensus'; The current high-power usage of ASIC in China is what is causing fee's to skyrocket.
There must be diversification of 'mining', can't have it all in CHINA. Trouble is CHINA also makes all the Mining HW,
Even the better alt-coins have given up fighting the GPU wars, and have just let bitmain sell equi-miners, and eth-miners; There used to be a real drive to keep the MINING on the CPU, so that everybody could mine & host a node, but now while you point out there are 100k dispersed nodes worldwide, all mining is done is CHina, or the majority, and all user the Chinese HW, which all calls home to china;
Real problem for future of BTC, but given that CHINA owns alll the media conduits, and exchanges, and pools; Nobody can seriously do anything except remain silent.
Full nodes aren't mining nodes, FYI. Full nodes validate the entire blockchain and then continue to validate and broadcast new transactions as they are received through the network. Miners run full nodes to ensure that the transactions they put into blocks are valid. If they don't do this they are at risk of putting invalid transactions into blocks, which would be rejected by the rest of the network, making their PoW meaningless.
To run a full node, you need a few hundred GB of storage, maybe 2GB of RAM, and a consistent network connection (where you don't have a cap on your down/uploads). Running a mining node is probably at least 2 orders of magnitude more challenging than running a full node.