It was just a marketing strategy of bitcoin cash founder. He spread a lot of positive of bitcoin cash to the crypto industry and promote his project buy making a negative news in bitcoin.
In civilized world this kind of "marketing strategies" is usually called a scam. These guys literally spammed the BTC network in order to increase the amount of unconfirmed transactions and at the same time spreaded lots of FUD saying that Bitcoin is dead. This was an obvious lie that aimed to mislead the emotional and naive users. They did everything to avoid the competition and get their coin pumped on fake panic.