> I suspect the "economically rational" choice would be to happily trade off that immediate loss against even a small chance of a simpler policy encouraging higher adoption of bitcoin, _or_ a small chance of more on-chain activity due to higher adoption of bitcoin protocols like lightning and thus a lower chance of an empty mempool in future.

Is this another way of saying a few developers will decide RBF policy for miners and they should follow it because it is the only way bitcoin gets more adoption? On-chain activity is dependent on lot of things. I suspect any change in policy will change it any time soon and miners should have the freedom to decide things that aren't consensus rules.

Lightning network contributes to on-chain activity only with opening and closing of channels. Based on the chart I see in the below link for channels opened/closed per block, its contribution is less than 1% in fees:

https://txstats.com/dashboard/db/lightning-network?orgId=1&from=now-6M&to=now

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Prayank

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