You need a bit of influence to make a fork worth anything though, there is no way that you can have a bunch of people just decide that they want to hard fork Bitcoin and expect to make money off of it. The past forks have always had something going along with them, such as SegWit or the group of miners that wanted Bitcoin to be decentralized again, they had something going for them. If you just try to be a dev and make a hardfork off of Bitcoin, there will rarely be anything of value come out of it.
Bitcoin Gold didn't really have influential people or important ideas involved with it. Its backers are largely unknown besides perhaps Jack Liao, who ironically runs an ASIC mining operation. The whole "making mining decentralized" line is just a gimmick. But perhaps it's an effective one given the bad blood between Bitmain and some of the community.
In the end, I think the Bitcoin Gold people were just in the right place at the right time -- between Bitcoin Cash and Segwit2x. All they needed was a couple press releases, a good name/logo, and a boogeyman (Bitmain) and all of a sudden, people think BTG matters. Crypto is so silly sometimes.