Segwit's goal wasn't the blocksize increase, so it's wrong to criticize it for it. And being opt-in is the result of softfork, and softforks are great because they are much less disruptive than hardforks, so there's almost no risk of chain splits.
It's also wrong to say that SegWit was complex, all you had to do is update your wallet software and create a new SegWit-compatible wallet. Some services did this only after a few days or a week after the fork, big services like Coinbase just didn't care about their customers, which resulted in huge fees later in 2017.
no risk of chain splits......................
........ apart from the one caused in august 2017 to actually get segwit activated
What chain split? Segwit reached the 95% threshold and activation went off without a hitch. There was never any network partition -- no orphaned chains post-fork, no lost transactions, nothing.
If you're talking about Bitcoin Cash, that was a new protocol that copied Bitcoin's ledger and launched at block height 478558. It was no more a "chain split" than any of the other dozens of Bitcoin forks (like Bitcoin Diamond and Super Bitcoin) were.