You call tweets like the ones you linked subtle? haha.

The only thing that's really happening is a (relatively limited) crisis in confidence in Bitcoin Core maintainers. This isn't new, and that it's over a relatively rational policy change also isn't new. It can be blown out of proportions even more but it also pleases me to see Nicolas Dorier on nearly every thread trying to explain people that they're misleading themselves.

If I were a maintainer of bitcoin/bitcoin, the only learning point from this would be to not mark controversial settings that people want to use, even if it makes no sense to use it to super smart rational people like gmax, as deprecated. Note that one of the maintainers tried to do this in #32714, but for some reason it was closed by the author with no reason given on GitHub. I'm too lazy to check IRC logs.

That's it, that's the signal. The rest is politics and noise.