Does RBF rule #3 make pinning attacks easier?

RBF rule #3 states:

The replacement transaction pays an absolute fee of at least the sum paid by the original transactions.

(https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0125.mediawiki#implementation-details)

The rationale for implementing this rule in Bitcoin Core's mempool policy is described as follows in the mempool-policy.md document:

Rationale: Only requiring the replacement transaction to have a higher feerate could allow an attacker to bypass node minimum relay feerate requirements and cause the network to repeatedly relay slightly smaller replacement transactions without adding any more fees. Additionally, if any of the original transactions would be included in the next block assembled by an economically rational miner, a replacement policy allowing the replacement transaction to decrease the absolute fees in the next block would be incentive-incompatible.

The sentence beginning, "Additionally, if..." sounds to be redundant in view of Rule 4, which requires a higher feerate for transaction replacement.

It seems that there is a class of transaction pining attacks that leverage abuse of RBF rule #3, described by the bitcoin optech transaction pinning article :

This can allow an attacker to attach a large and low-feerate transaction to the transaction they want to pin, forcing any fee bump to pay for the replacement of the large child transaction. E.g., with the 2019 Bitcoin Core defaults, an attacker can require an honest participant pay a minimum of 0.001 BTC to fee bump a transaction (or even greater amounts in some cases).

Are there some other classes of pinning attacks that RBF rule #3 makes impossible? What is the value of RBF rule #3 that makes designing around the pinning attacks it makes possible worth it?



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