even when attacked from the inside by blockstream/core it just forks and offers two chains. at least one will continue delivering p2p electronic money to the people with low fees. maybe both? we'll see. 
Maybe, I don't know if there ware any successful hardforks in it's development to fix a bug or something. But to my knowladge, this hardfork was planed by Satoshi himself, long time ago. I can't say I know with certainty all the fork history and changes in protocol and design of Bitcoin all these years, but I am pretty certain that making your blocks bigger is not really stepping away from Bitcoin's originality.