The people who care a lot about this kind of thing read BIPs a lot. BIP 119 is an example of a proposal that got a lot of heat as a result of (at the time) proposing to only ask miners to show their approval with no regard for full node operators.

User Rejected Soft Fork clients and User Activated Soft Fork clients have been proposed in the past, but abandoning core entirely was also part of the discussion. These are alternatives to Bitcoin core that don't fork the blockchain: https://bitcoin.eu/bitcoin-core-alternatives-dont-fork-blockchain/