Are we on a path for BIP444 to activate on Bitcoin?

Using consensus rules to fight spam seems misguided to me. If people want to combat mempool spam, that should be done through policy, and node operators should have access to as many policy tools as necessary. Stripping away policy options feels needlessly confrontational, especially when it is done in the name of enforcing a homogeneous mempool across all nodes.

Why not simply let node operators decide their own policies and defuse this whole situation? Is aiming for mempool uniformity really worth risking a contentious fork?