The successful miner for each block, in theory, can decide what they want to include or exclude in the block they mine. In practise, however, most pools don't pass on this option to miners. OCEAN is trying to change that and give power back to the miners. If you win the block, you get to choose the contents of the block, even if you are in a pool. As a non mining node runner, we don't get to make any choices, we agree consensus and include the block, whatever it contains in our own chains. Knots, however, does allow node runners some flexibility, it allows node runners to exclude runes for example. The migration from core to knots by non mining node runners is more of a silent protest and public metrics showing this shift would be a very strong indicator to core developers that the community does not support them, so in this respect, it is a vote.

Silent protest... We've come full circle I think.