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There very well could be many "fake" nodes. It's very easy to spoof a node which is doing nothing more than relay and signaling (no validation, storage etc.). The reason you would do this is to be able to run lots of them at low computer resource cost.

Exactly, hence my (probably bad) use of the quotes. It is very cheap to spoof nodes, validating or not. This can easily be seen with the recent explosion of UASF nodes.