This is a quote from one of the articles you mention:
Ocean's debut comes as some legacy mining pools have been the subject of controversy for censoring certain transactions, as "censorship resistance" is considered by many Bitcoiners to be a cardinal principle of the largest and original blockchain.
I mean, it will be "censorship resistant", but at the same time, their decision to refuse to relay Whirlpool transactions, isn't it considered censhorship?
I'm all for adding more flexibility to the settings users can change but this sounds like a malicious centralized move. Not to mention that you don't need to ban other implementations such as Knots if you run a full node like bitcoin core. The only difference in Knots is some of the standard rules and there is a reason why they are called "standard rules", they are preference not a ban worthy offense. For example your node may decide not to relay txs with fee rate lower than 10 sat/vb but that doesn't mean your node should be banned!
According to o_e_l_e_o's original post, Knots is run only by 0.4% of the current nodes.
If you ask me, as I mentionned above, I agree that banning wasn't something I had in mind until now. I am ok with identifying if some of my peers constantly reject my transactions and manually banning them, but I don't really want to make a ban using a "wildcard" or something like that.
But Bitcoin is fantastic because anyone is allowed to do whatever they want with their nodes. Their nodes their rules.