[phasmantistes]

The issue with saying that "there's a 60/40 split, therefore there's no consensus" is that the IETF explicitly documents that that isn't the case: RFC 7282, Section 7, "Five people for and one hundred people against might still be rough consensus" (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7282#section-7).

The working group chairs have to decide if all of the objections have been "addressed". However, "addressed" doesn't mean "fixed via changes in the document", it can also mean "debunked on the mailing list" or "dismissed out of hand as irrelevant". So your argument that there obviously isn't consensus doesn't actually hold up.

[eqvinox]

What I said was "It makes much more sense to argue there is no consensus […] can be argued even in a "60:40" situation regardless of direction".

Not "there's a 60/40 split, therefore there's no consensus".

Can be argued even in. That's a statement of allowance, not sufficiency. And I was speaking in the context of contrasting against a vote. You can't argue with a vote's tally.