Bitcoin Core isn't necessarily based on perfect consensus. It's an implementation, and even if it's the reference implementation, it is not the only one. That's the beauty of open source software and open protocols.

I don't know how much you have read about the proposal (your last sentence in that post about nodes which should leave Core makes me think that you, in reality, understand the situation well, but the rest of the post and also the next post goes into another direction ...), but it is not a protocol change we're talking about here, but a change of default values and the removal of a feature for nodes.

If this proposal goes through, everybody is free to:

1) Fork Bitcoin Core, change the default values for OP_RETURN back, and continue to maintain the -datacarrier feature (which allows to limit the size of data put in OP_RETURN outputs, but not the data stuffed into fake public keys!).

2) Use another Bitcoin implementation, for example Luke-jr's Bitcoin Knots. That's what many critics of this PR are doing, and this is completely okay!

This is why this assumption is simply wrong:


I highlighted the part of the nodes because this is the important part. The truth is that the devs have no power to impose a change. The nodes can simply decide to use the patched/forked version and even decide to use completely different defaults for the standardness values.

Even if it was a protocol change, then the nodes could still decide the same way, albeit with the risk of forking the chain. And the economic majority would decide which fork becomes the consensus.

This is why I said the power of Core devs is drastically overrated by some. Core deves have some social power as "influencers" in the Bitcoin community, but not power at all to impose technical changes. It's more: the incentives work here in favour of listening to the community. If they don't, then they risk to lose the leadership to another implementation, be it Knots or whatever.

I still think for these reasons there's way, way too much drama around that PR.