As I explained in an article a couple of weeks ago, I think the threat (or promise, depending on your point of view) of protocol ossification is somewhat overblown, at least at this point in time.
Yes, the rate of soft forks has slowed significantly over the years, most recently Taproot in 2021. But this seems to have more to do with the lack of interest in potential upgrades that have been proposed since then, rather than due to the lack of a good process for deploying upgrades Protocol. (Although this is not a completely solved problem either.)
Bitcoin Core developers are generally funded on a no-strings-attached or outright volunteer basis, meaning they are not required to work on any specific part of the code base. As such, their time and energy will be allocated to whatever they find most interesting or important to work on. So far, this hasn’t really been any of the soft fork:variant proposals Covenant style opcodes They are not unequivocally seen as offering the kind of groundbreaking use cases that are worth prioritizing, and when Drive chains These coins sound great in theory, but the main downside is that miners can end up stealing the coins from them.
But even if Bitcoin Core developers aren’t interested, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to upgrade Bitcoin. For better or worse, anyone with the right skill set (not too low bar) can always deploy a soft fork through an alternative client, even with the user activating a soft fork (UASF). However, despite some grumbling from time to time, no one has done so yet.
I suspect this is at least partly because proponents of these soft forks are not convinced that UASF will actually be successful. And if UASF doesn’t work, the upgrade probably isn’t worth doing in the first place…
This article is a takes. The opinions expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.