[nebabyte]

They took a vote and the vast majority voted for the HF.

Had Vitalik ignored the vote and put his organization and the "canonical" chain on the non-HF side his would be the "abandoned" no-name chain, and people would now be mining some ETH derivative in line with their votes.

This is honestly just a fulfillment of "code is law", with the obvious rule above it being "humans accept or reject laws collectively". In this case, people rejected the former "law" and opted for one that captured the spirit/intent rather than the letter.

[dsacco]

The whole value proposition of "code is law" is that the letter of the law theoretically obviates the spirit of the law.