Yet, as I hope you’ve learned from this post, every existing blockchain network, including the Bitcoin network, can freeze the funds in an account, as long as all the block producers on that network agree to do so. All they have to do is agree not to include the transactions into their blocks.
So during the time when 22.2 was active for many top-20 witnesses, if the steemit account did some of the transactions that 22.2 was designed to block like issuing a transfer, would the transactions have eventually gone through because one of the non-22.2 witnesses (either in the top-20 or the timeshared backups) would have eventually encountered them and processed them (having no reason not to under the code they were running at the time)?
A lower-ranked witness not running the softfork code could have produced a block that contained such transactions. But the witnesses running the softfork would have rejected that block itself (they wouldn't have added it to their local chain of blocks).
This would have resulted in two different chains on the network: one with the block and one without. These two chains would then compete and eventually the longest chain wins (which would have been the softfork chain, because far more active witnesses were running the softfork).
So the block would have become "orphaned" in the terminology of blockchains and the transaction would not be recognized as valid by the network.