Yep, and those of us who were hodlers of both sides were labelled fools and shills. You've got to be a special kind of cocky to think only one side of a contentious fork is valuable and that you can pick which side that is immediately after the fork. Clearly there are people who value each path. That's why it is contentious.
A contentious fork is something different. BCH was not launched as a result of a contentious fork, more like an altcoin with a shared tx history but with different parameters.
A major catalyst for BCH was segwit being forced down miners throats when less than the original threshold was in favor of it.
IIRC the code was rather clear that in case of less than X% miner adoption segwit wouldn't happen, with X being something like 90-95%... how is that "forcing" miners? Segwit only happened because the miners signaled in favor of it - even though some had a twist (2x) to it.
BCH forked off to avoid segwit and increase blocksize. How is that not a contentious fork?
One morning Wu decided that if btc goes with segwit he will launch his altcoin. This is unilateral action. It's like me deciding that I want to launch bitcoin for whatever reason. It's not an organic split like what happened, say, in ETH, where the devs proposed a change and some people stuck with the old chain where "code is law". There's a difference. Even Wu won't claim BCH is Bitcoin. He says it's something different. At least he's honest about it.