The sequence you've documented is damning. But there's a frame worth separating out. Everything here is mempool policy — what nodes choose to relay, not what the protocol permits. That distinction isn't a defense of the process; the process looks bad. It's a question about what the stakes actually are. The real concern is whether default settings become de facto consensus over time. When 90%+ of nodes run the same defaults, "configurable" can become theoretical in practice. The 22% switch to Knots is the healthy immune response to exactly that dynamic — it's node operators reasserting that defaults aren't law. What this episode exposed isn't that Bitcoin's consensus rules were compromised. It's that the governance of *defaults* has no clear legitimacy mechanism, and that gap can be exploited quietly, through documentation amendments and rejected PRs, without ever touching consensus. That's the more durable lesson here.