You’re right. Just all mine need to be full nodes. lol

It might raise the hardware barrier,

but you still have to use IBD and prune after the download finish’s anyway, it’s the same requirement up front.

Less IBD nodes increases centralization and relies on more trust. Saying “we’re making this change, you can just prune” is the worst for decentralization of the nodes.

It’s not theoretical. We’ve already seen it! Wallets default to public Electrum servers. People syncing through Blockstream.info. Light clients like wallet-as-a-service models. Some of these users don’t even know that they’re using a trusted service.

These are fine options but become points of failure when only option for a node is “just prune it dude”