Aspects described herein relate to on-demand soft acknowledgement (ACK)/negative acknowledgement (NACK) in radio access and other wireless networks, such as fifth generation new radio (5G NR), 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE), 3GPP LTE-Advanced (LTE-A), Wi-Fi, and the like. In an example, the aspects may include receiving, from a network entity, a request to enable soft ACK/NACK feedback; enabling the soft ACK/NACK feedback based on the request, where the soft ACK/NACK feedback comprises at least a link quality metric per diversity branch; and transmitting, to the network entity, the soft ACK/NACK feedback based on a determination to enable the soft ACK/NACK feedback.