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The BCH fans prefer a literal interpretation of Satoshi's white paper, which does not discuss nodes. When writing the paper, and in the software he had spent almost 2 years developing, every node was a miner and every miner was a node. But, at launch he discovered that mining slowed his laptop to useless, so he made mining optional and set mining off by default. This decision separated the node role from the mining role. Obviously, the white paper was never edited. Less obviously, this quirk and other quirks where the launch software and subsequent versions deviate from the white paper were never documented in a way which answers the question - why is this different from the white paper?
The justification for Bitcoin's decentralised design is given in two short paragraphs under the "Introduction" heading. It's very clear, in a way which supports a different interpretation depending on the reader's prejudices. It supports a "whack-a-mole" interpretation - that Bitcoin avoids the problems caused by centralised on-line payment systems by not relying on a trusted third party, and its network can't be shut down. But the words don't explicitly describe this. Also, it wasn't true in the software which Satoshi developed. It became true later, when the node network became large and diverse enough to resist arbitrary shutdown attacks. Even as late as 2013, a centralised chain tip rollback was possible, and was used after the BIP-050 bug was fixed
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawiki
Practically, it makes sense to rely on the non-mining nodes to verify new blocks after the fact of mining, because miners do make consensus errors
In the whack-a-mole context, it's risky to rely on mining nodes as the definitive consensus mechanism, because there are so few of them (because of mining pools, something else not predicted by Satoshi)
In the governance context, it's well-recognised that BTC's reliance on acceptance of consensus changes by node operators is a potential point of failure. If node network acceptance is too slow to respond to an emergency, BTC could fail
On the other hand, the node network's inertia protects BTC from unwise consensus changes such as the foolishness currently promoted in BIP-110
Read the recent progress of the BCH major consensus changes. The BCH developers are confident that the changes will be accepted, because BCH isn't encumbered by a large network of user-operated nodes
Before Bitcoin, centralised Internet payment systems were easily shut down by law enforcement overreach (E-Gold and Liberty Dollar). But those events are long forgotten. Decentralisation has the benefit of being resilient against arbitrary shutdown, but there have been very few (and very weak, such as the Ripple case) attempts at regulatory shutdown since 2018
> Most nodes didn't switch
This is only important in a world where there has to be a competition with only one winner. The attempted political attack on Bitcoin was focused on SegWit2X. It failed because the proponents didn't understand the nature of open software development, didn't understand decentralisation in the node network, and because they failed to hire a competent developer team. If they had addressed only the last point, there could have been a SegWit2X fork as well as BTC and BCH
Nodes don't vote, so there never needs to be a majority. For either side of a fork to succeed, there only needs to be enough nodes to prevent a regulatory shutdown attack. If there's no regulatory shutdown attack, there only needs to be one node. In some forks, there also needs to be sufficient miner hashes to mine blocks in a short-enough time. BCH developers coded a workaround which allowed a lower hashrate to mine enough blocks

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