"You can just do things!" Well, not really. Core has a tremendous amount of latent power for at least two reasons:

(i) every business has basically hardcoded the use of that implementation with levels of risk aversion surpassing "never got fired for buying IBM," creating an amazing de facto monopoly on economic nodes, and

(ii) bitcoin is so complicated tha

t any non-developer inherently must delegate to some technical authority they trust, and Core winds up (for most sane people) being the target of that delegation.

This is a tremendous amount of sticky power. To not acknowledge that is naive.

Yes, in theory a large part of the ecosystem could decide to run an alternate implementation - but the switching/coordination/incidental-risk costs there are huge. It would take a 5-10x reward:risk proposition for most businesses to switch.

And meanwhile, the Core line is so often "well running another implementation would be dangerous! think of the possible consensus incompatibilities!" Convenient.

This single chokepoint is going to be a big problem for bitcoin, even if the filters issue isn't per se an epitome of it."