This thing has gotten so political that something as simple as EC for blocksize is made out to be way more radical than it really is, imo.
Please note the proposal is not so much to increase block size as to counter spam.
This spam filter can be used even without a soft fork. Users may run full nodes in order to reject blocks which contain transactions with a very low fee. The more nodes, the better it works.
With support >75% of miners, we can activate soft fork and spam filter will effectively reject the majority of undesirable blocks.
The spam problem will be completely solved when remaining miners update their soft. Then only if 95% of the miners signal readiness we can remove the hard limit on the block size. So Bitcoin cannot split in two.
