Node counts are poor indicators of consensus power but they still matter as a rough indicator of network accessibility and verification culture

Consensus is determined by the interaction of proof of work and the economic majority choosing which rules to run It is not determined by counting nodes or by policy edicts

Policy that relies on excluding transactions from a neutral permissionless system tends to be brittle because it assumes the participants have no incentive or capability to route around it History shows that assumption is weak

In short the fact that node numbers are easy to game is not a bug in Bitcoin design It is part of the reason the system does not assign them any direct authority The real defense of the system is economic skin in the game on the mining side and independent verification on the user side not a poll of how many nodes some crawler can see on the network today