The best thing about knots is that it's NOT part of the Bitcoin Core project, at least in terms of governance, while sharing much of the same code, especially consensus related. This is important for people who are unhappy with the direction core is moving and have no other way of expressing themselves besides running a different implementation.

Murch raises some concerns about the "unilateral" nature of knots, being modified and maintained, by a single dev (in contrast to core's 40 regular contributors) which makes this PR especially reckless. The person who made the PR (Todd) is telling unhappy node runners to "just run knots" on stage at bitcoin++ while defending on behalf of Core the op_return change he has been a proponent of for some time, and which was met with similar resistance the last time he proposed it. This is in a real sense an endorsement by Core, at least of Knots as a viable alternative. Meanwhile, another core dev Murch, is ringing alarm bells about Knots as a project with "a single developer pushing directly to master without peer review." A project node runners are being told to use by the PR author if they don't like it? Something stinks. This PR should be withdrawn immediately.