Ethereum is not Bitcoin. Ethereum just showed the world Botcoin's unique value compared to Ethereum and the thousands of crypto projects so often conflated with Bitcoin.
The 2017 Bitcoin scaling wars proved that one can't simply change Bitcoin's consensus rules by majority control of the miners. I think at one point 80% of the miners were in favor of large blocks, yet they didn't have buy-in from the rest of the network participants (developers, regular users, merchants, exchanges).
I just don't see the relevance considering the absolutely insane amount of things that have happened that would cause nobody to act in this fashion again, namely...uh...many public people are using the project publicly.
The fork stuck because it was still an alpha, as far as society was concerned.
It's currently in a grey area between a social movement and a FOSS project, and it simply started as a FOSS project.
I think it's important to characterize what occurred with this context. Devs won't get another chance at that without the project (and movement!) ending — and everyone knows it.
The 2017 Bitcoin scaling wars proved that one can't simply change Bitcoin's consensus rules by majority control of the miners. I think at one point 80% of the miners were in favor of large blocks, yet they didn't have buy-in from the rest of the network participants (developers, regular users, merchants, exchanges).
Bitcoin has really robust decentralization.