for starters the term "Bitcoin maximalists" is both created and used by altcoin pumpers who have been trying to scam people into buying their premined coin so that they could make money by selling the created out of thin air coins to them and make millions.
mostly seem to affirm that nothing can ever be an improvement to Bitcoin.
you might have misunderstood what most people say.
there is a difference between saying there can never be anything better than bitcoin or saying there hasn't been anything better than bitcoin. the former is just stupid and the later is a reality.
Primarily it stifles innovation,
i strongly disagree.
innovation dies when developers start wanting to make the most amount of money instead of wanting to improve on what bitcoin innovation introduced.
that is why there has been so many tokens (ie. the easiest way to make money by doing nothing).
Some altcoins and other cryptocurrencies do have some unique advantages over Bitcoin currently, namely;
- Better privacy / anonymity features.
- Faster transaction / confirmation times.
- Useful PoW schemes
- Smart contracts etc.,
advantages should be measured as a whole not individually. for example there are altcoins that have "bigger" blocks than bitcoin and individually this seems like an advantage but it is not an advantage as a whole, instead it is a severe flaw.
or the most popular better privacy coins (that are actually privacy coins not just pretending) have serious scaling issues that are caused by that privacy feature.