If you propose a change to a popular node, a node with many up-votes, the proposal will stay in pending status until it gets at least half of the net-votes (= up-votes - down-votes) on the node. This way, as soon as proposing a child node/improvement on a node with $\leq 2$ net-votes (= up-votes - down-votes), the proposal gets immediately implemented, but proposals on more popular nodes require consensus from the community to be implemented.