Opinion: if a soft work works, it should be preferred, if for no other
reason than once a hard-fork is planned, the discussion begins about
what else to throw in. To minimize the frequency of hard-forks, the
time for that is when the change being considered actually requires one.

I'm not sure why it'd be any different. Soft forks are just as disruptive - everyone who needs a correct node has to upgrade on time. Given that, I guess there will be a desire to roll out several changes at once too, regardless of what happens to older nodes.