The large and important difference between these 2 situations is that on one occasion you have a side trying to push a major change (big blockers who lost on the social consensus front) and on the other, a major change that has already been pushed regardless of any social consensus. There’s no power grab, it’s just people against this change to op_return pointing out the issues involved with the relaxation of filters. Because core has already pushed this change and it looks as though it will be released in v30, the only way people thinking this change is reckless can voice their opinion is by running knots with customisable mempool policies.

What Luke is saying in that post you linked is that either:

- Core with this change and/or potentially future changes made in a similarly rash fashion could/will destroy bitcoin or at least make running nodes unfavourable for the average Bitcoiner leading to centralisation

- Or the bitcoin community will push back against core, diminishing core’s reputation and credibility to potentially nothing.

Personally I think the latter, as I think there are more bitcoiners who wish for it to remain as a monetary protocol rather than a JPEG database / cloud storage…

It’s completely different because Core (the reference implementation) initiated this and so likening the push back from people against spam to the big blockers, who were trying to push something new (larger blocks) doesn’t make sense.