Come winter we'll know how it shakes out I guess. I just never understood the case for how what the rest of the network does doesn't matter, and that a small group of people will implement this thing and impose it on everyone without their permission. Like if they have that power, and consensus doesn't matter, then why didn't they just do it months ago?

I think it's mostly non-technologists wishing on a star that the laziest interpretation of how a UASF works will somehow come true. Bitcoin consensus being as easy to change as activating a yammering pack of hyenas has two possible explanations: 1) It can't, and they're all actually just as dumb as a bag of hair 2) It can, and bitcoin has a much wider, retarded attack surface than anyone, in 17 years of Bitcoin discourse, ever thought.

The crazy part of the 2nd one is that attackers have a lot of self-restraint to not launch their own attacks before bip110 hits if it's just that easy. What I'm thinking is that knots nodes are like a malicious bot army designed to make this attack possible at all. They can't do it immediately because they need as many knots nodes on the network as possible, and the timeline is designed to give the psyop campaign time to get that percentage up.

As in all things with bitcoin, gathering and projecting cheap opinions without bringing economic weight is futile. They can spin up all the Little Nodes that Could they like, but if they don't clearly present support from major transaction oroginators or miners, it's just a bunch of wasted time and energy.