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.
Support was at around 40 percent. Then BIP-148 came along and threatened to disconnect any nodes that relayed blocks that were not signaling for segwit. At that point, you either signal or stop mining, so miners signaled. They were also encouraged by strong support (90%+) for the segwit2x agreement, which turned out to be a joke.
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.
There is a very large community of bitcoiners besides Wu involved with BCH. If you never venture out of bitcointalk.org or /r/bitcoin, I can't blame you for being blind to it. Censorship tends to create echo chambers, to the detriment of the people in those chambers. I never made the claim that BCH is Bitcoin. Clearly that moniker is more closely associated with the Segwit chain. But that may change with time. My claim is that BCH is more closely aligned with Satoshi's whitepaper. At 1MB and with 2 week difficulty adjustment, the segwit chain is much more fragile than BCH. BCH's mempool has not ever seen backlog and now that the difficulty adjustment algorithm has been upgraded, blocks times are much more reliable than the segwit chain.