Your question is one that someone who wasn't here for 2016-2017 would ask.
Well, I was not here for 2016-2017. I started buying Bitcoin in 2018, maybe 2019.
Developers drew the line saying 1mb was the limit (look up all the shady stuff that surrounded the NY Agreement) and basically forced these businesses to fork the network or lose their entire investment of time and money, which they did to grow Bitcoin and was wildly appreciated at the time.
What happened, should stay in the past. Now we know that new features can be introduced with no forks at all, even no soft-fork is needed, you can read more about it here:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-June/020532.html. Of course, sidechains can also solve "coin merging" problem, but I think not many altcoiners want to for example merge BTC and BCH into a single coin again, so there is no need for that yet. But it is just a matter of proportions, any altcoin can reach a peg again, if they don't want to do that, they are free to stay unpegged, just they should not be surprised that their coins will be left behind the heaviest chain, if they designed it to be a competition, instead of reusing the strongest source of SHA-256d hashes, no matter where it will be produced. They could do a soft-fork or no-fork back then, big blocks are different from small blocks only by the time when each tranaction is included. They could get it protected by Merged Mining (and commitments could protect them from chain reorganizations), and have their transactions included later, it was that simple. I guess people were just unaware of possible technical solutions that always existed, from the first released version. And they still are, including me, it is a continuous process of learning, what is possible.
so they eliminated that risk by issuing their own altcoins
Now they could issue their own sidechains. No permission is needed, coins can be created by signing on-chain coins, and destroyed by moving them. Nothing else is really needed, the rest is about making it convenient, and protecting mainchain coins with the right output scripts, to allow moving them if (and only if) each and every owner of that coin agreed to move back to the mainchain.
It was a perfectly reasonable response that was met with extreme hate, as Bitcoiners wanted their coin to be the only game in town, and for them to have to do nothing but hold it to get rich.
Pure speculation with no usage will lead us nowhere. If people want to speculate, or if they want to never use their coins, they should have that choice. Holding coins forever is like owning something on OP_RETURN. You can do that, but it won't be useful. You need money to pay for goods and services, the whole value can be created from real usage and real features. Of course it can be created artificially, but then it will vanish over time. And I don't want to make things that will be worthless after few years, I want to make a system I would want to also use, from the perspective of some non-miner and non-developer, who will have no power, and will just want to write some applications for existing coins. It should be still useful in that case, because it is all about control, and to make it decentralized, the creator should have no control over the network, even if it will be based on Proof of Stake.