I see that as burying one's head 100 feet deep in the sand and laying down a foot-thick concrete slab on top.

Transaction fees did not go up, because most clients were not prepared to upgrade their fees, and replace-by-fee is still not a common practice.  Transactions that paid the standard fee got delayed for many hours.  If the "attackers" had used higher paying transactions,  then hiigher-paying transactions would have been delayed too.  

The "attackers" had intended to spend 5000 euros on the test, but their own BitcoinD servers crashed under the load and so they gave up after spending less than 500 euros.  Even so, the large queues that formed at the nodes crashed Blockchain.info, knocked out bitcoin ATMs, caused problems for BitPay and other services.

The small-blockians have no meaningful technical arguments against the block increase, so they are resorting to personal attacks on Mike and Gavin, and exaggerating the danger of a possible a split of the coin.  Which would never be a real risk if they did not make such a fuss about the increase themselves.

Again, I am each day more convinced that Blockstream had promised to their investors that the network would saturate in a year or two, and then the crowds would come knocking at their door for their Sidechains/LN solutions; and that Blockstream had most of the core devs, so that they could make the changes that they needed to the protocol while blocking any changes that their competitors would need.  That would explain why they were so upset, and why they continue to oppose it when the major players have all agreed to it.