Forking is not only solution. There are some POW that worthy to be mined still available in the market. I will mention some like ETC and RVN. These coins are still worthy and profitable enough to be mined by miners and so, forking ethereum will be only creating another noise in the crypto community. Crypto can be labelled as a scam caused by that.
This was simply inevitable, it is obvious that miners which invest a huge amount of money in equipment were not going to be happy about the change, and at least for them the most obvious solution to all of this is to create their own fork, but while people may use it for a while and be excited about it because of the free money they're going to get, after a few months people are going to move on, this is exactly the same that happen with the segwit upgrade we saw in bitcoin, and for a time bitcoin cash and other forks became quite popular but eventually bitcoin imposed itself and I think the same is going to happen here.