Take the statement "everybody is free to fork" for example. While technically true, it overlooks a critical reality: not everyone has equal power in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
This is of course true. What I meant however was that the Core team
alone can't drive anyone in a certain direction. Thus the comparison with a CBDC @headingnorth brought up is completely inappropiate.
The big three powers can be considered: (protocol) developers, miners and economic nodes (those accepting or holding Bitcoin and running full nodes).
In my interpretation the Core team is the entity with the least amount of technical power, i.e. they can't impose a protocol or default value change at all due to the right to fork and the open protocol, only that they have a quite large social power (as "leaders of opinion"). But this power is also limited. And they are only a part of the "developers" power group: they are currently the leaders, but they can lose this status, even if due to inertia this may not occur fastly.
In reality, it's more like a lobbying system -- those with the most influence can effectively dictate the outcome, regardless of what the majority of users or even nodes want.
I agree with that, but not completely with the following sentence:
If core developers, large mining pools, and major exchanges agree on a new direction, they can effectively drag the rest of the network with them -- even if thousands of smaller nodes disagree.
If the majority of economic nodes disagrees with this new direction, then they will very likely successfully repel this change. The "majority" here is of course not the number of nodes, but the influence the nodes have on price.
Exchanges and important other service providers (e.g. Bitpay) have a higher influence per BTC than normal "hodlers" or merchants. But they can't impose a new direction if the majority of other economic nodes disagrees (again, not the node count, but weighted by importance). They can make a difference if there's a 50:50 scenario between supporters and opposers, but not in a 80:20, perhaps even a 60:40 majority is already enough.
Let's delve a bit deeper in your example:
You wrote that if a tiny minority (50 of 10000+) nodes ran a hardforked Bitcoin and had support by Core, most miners, CMC and major exchanges, they would be able to impose a new direction.
Yes, that would be a scary situation and probably lead to high price volatility. I however consider this scenario very unlikely to play out favourably for this big lobbyist cartel which is ignoring the wishes of 95% of the nodes. There will be very likely an immense backlash against these changes (the Segwit war would be nothing compared to that). The node operators will be likely able to impose the original bitcoin by selling the fork coins, even if they are labeled as "Bitcoin" by the exchanges.
In addition, most of these actors need the "real" Bitcoin users to have success. Exchanges can lose their leadership if they are boycotted by big numbers of users. Miners which change to the opposing "team" would be much more profitable than the other team if the original chain is able to survive the first "attack wave" with less losses than expected.
Of course there is an entity which could help the cartel to succeed, and that's: big whales. That's why I'd not like to see too much state involvement in Bitcoin via big strategic reserves. States/governments do have the power to acquire so many bitcoins that they could make such a fork succeed. Let's say 7, 6 or even 5 million BTC owned by cooperating governments or central banks and sold in a coordinated action on the original fork - this would be quite dangerous. They would have almost a similar power to the Ethereum team which imposed the ETH hard fork against the ETC folks.
Saying things like "go write your own code" or "run your own node with your own rules" is like telling someone to "go start your own country" -- it just doesn't work that way. Your node isn't remotely as important as Foundry's.
But an user majority which owns also a majority of the coins, even if most of these holders are small, does have the power to make that work.
Have you ever seen Core devs posting here asking if we want to implement a new change?
They may not do that here, but they discuss changes on the mailing list and on Github, and everybody can participate.
Taproot wasn't really controversial, so it wasn't "imposed" by Core. Most saw the changes simply as improvements (and imo they were correct, despite of those thinking that Ordinals highlighted a "bug" in Taproot).
That's also questionable. A great example is the UASF event, which was essentially a standoff between Core devs and every other major power.
More precisely it was a standoff between Core devs and a large number of economic nodes (the "community") against the other powers. While the Core devs acted with their social powers as "influencers", those who imposed the change were the nodes, not Core. It's actually a similar example than the action I described above against a big miner/Core/exchange cartel.