i fail to understand what the drama is all about.
the fork only needs 1 block to happen, and this one block can be delayed a little bit (a couple of minutes tops) before being mined. then the rest of the blocks building on top of it can be from nearly 0 (empty block with only coinbase tx) to 2 MB.
so where is the problem with that?
There are many problems with that, but the specific problem that caused this particular failure is that the hardfork block was delayed not by "a couple minutes", but by
29 hours, because that's how long it took the miners to realise that the segwit2x client
won't actually produce >1MB blocks by default, and hence rejects its own blocks when the fork happens.

(Many probably still haven't realised the default is broken as it only took a single miner with custom settings to mine the fork block, and since the issue was closed without changing the default behaviour, it's likely to happen all over again if they try to fork on mainnet. Get your popcorn ready.)