Could you mimic the effects of a soft fork solely by tightening mempool policies?
Not really. Making mempool policy stricter may eventually cause blocks to exclude transactions infringing on the new rules as hashrate updates. However, as long as just a small portion of the nodes (perhaps as little as 2–5%) run with the old rules and at least one miner has not upgraded, the transactions would still appear in blocks.
On the other hand, a softfork enforced by a majority of the hashrate would actually reorganize offending blocks out of the best chain since it would actually be a consensus rule rather than a policy rule.
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