Mempools aren't there to express personal preference; they're there for the health of decision making of your nodes and your peer nodes (i.e. knowing asap what transactions may be in the next blocks). Assuming you aren't mining.
Of course you *can* use your mempool to express opinion instead, but it doesn't help you.
I think bitcoin has gone too far to accommodate spam. Yes, that's my subjective opinion of what spam is, which is the only definition that matters to me. This is the one lever I can pull to fight that as a node runner. Maybe you think that's naive. I do not care. I'm not giving it up. Even if you're right, and I'm convinced to turn off this option, I insist on having a way to go back, without downgrading, to what I'm doing now. I feel burned by unintended consequences in the past, so I will do whatever I can to avoid the same mistake. Maybe running knots is just a futile gesture, but if that's all I can do then so be it.
If mempools aren’t there to express personal preference then why are they not consensus rules?
You are projecting your personal preference of removing the limits on OP_RETURN with no way for users to opt out (aside from not updating or running knots) and have the audacity to say that the people who want to keep bitcoin the same are using the mempool to express their personal opinion is some backwards ass logic.
The reason why libre relay isn’t enough for people like yourself are that not enough node runners are opting to run this spam blasting node on their own and getting spam txs in blocks is still difficult. Thats why spammers are pushing for bitcoin core to make this policy change and their hope is that 1/2 of the node runners who are running the most current version blindly update to the latest version and propagate spam.
