What happens if he refuses to accept that block, and another miner creates a block without that transaction, and he accepts that. Won't this create a soft fork, and it will be up to other miners to decide which fork to run with.
Have you seen
fork-observer? It shows what happens block forks: it gets ignored. In your scenario, in which certain miners reject a certain transaction, those miners will need 51% of the hashrate to win this.
What happens is 70% of the nodes decide to only accept tx fees of 3 sats or more and mining pools decide to put fees in of 0.1 sats or more
do we lower the nodes from 20000 to 6000 and the network is weaker.
nodes are cheap is there an attack point here?
A country could easily do 100,000 new nodes for under 250 each or 25 million to launch the attack.
vs 51% of the hash rate which is billions to attack.