[iracigt]

It's true that the bigger question is "what is the impact of a collision?". For many of them, the answer is probably nothing. In an industry where 1 in 10,000 makes people uncomfortable though, I think it's enough be to be potential headache. Increasing density of LEO would make that worse. It doesn't need to be a runaway effect to be economically or especially politically problematic.

Proactively deorbiting at EoL is definitely the correct move, but requires enough runway to continue short term operations. I can absolutely picture this being used as political leverage.

[BWStearns]

I imagine if SpaceX was financially toast and trying to ransom LEO for a bailout then we'd probably just Defense Production Act them and give them a loan for only enough to pay the staff to deorbit the constellation.