The devs can change anything, it's just software. As long as miners, which are extremely centralized, agree it's the new chain.

I was a part of the bitcointalk forums in 2010 when the dev team created a soft fork that modified the blockchain to change consensus rules. THink about it, devs changed the consensus mechanism, that goes against everything bitcoin is supposed to be. They can do it again

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident