Most of those arguments were made by people who don't understand what they are talking about, but that doesn't mean fuckery wasn't afoot. Segwit was falsely positioned as an alternative to increasing the block size, and after it went into effect, the pro-segwit people refused to raise the block size like the promised to, claiming some technicality. The result was that fees went astronomical, Steam stop accepting Bitcoin along with many other merchants and bitcoin went from being useful as a currency (a threat to fiat) to being a pure ponzi scheme like wall street had always smeared it as. And who was paying the anti-big block, pro-segwit devs? Oh that's right, private equity backed startups like blockstream.

>the bigger block people had thing and were basically in full on sabotage-bitcoin mode.

Failing to raise the block size and the resulting loss of real economic activity on the chain were what sabotaged BTC, exactly as the "bitcoin should be like gold" people wanted. Twisting that around and blaming the bigger block people for "sabotaging bitcoin" by warning that this would happen is beyond insane.

Segwit was a good change. But it was used by wall street to kill bitcoin and it worked.