As someone who hadn't followed closely: the consensus is among miners, right? The network is still PoW, not PoS?
So it's not a consensus based on DAO shares or ETH holdings, which represent the broader community, but rather based on GPU power, representing a small number of groups?
Yes, a soft fork means consensus (majority) among miners. The developers (of Geth, Parity, cpp-ethereum, etc.) can propose the changes, but it's up to the miners whether to adopt them.
Note that the Ethereum mining community is considerably more decentralized than e.g. Bitcoin.
It explains the reasons why the community should not do this. Also the community has generally updated and followed whatever the "leadership" has done so far and for good reason.
If the "leadership" decides to go this way as it appears they do, the community will likely follow them as they have done in the past.
This is a big test for Ethereum. The DAO holders were warned clearly about these kind of issues before hand, yet some sort of collective mania made very smart people go deaf.
So it's not a consensus based on DAO shares or ETH holdings, which represent the broader community, but rather based on GPU power, representing a small number of groups?