Actually you're not correct about soft forks. Soft forks are now an "established" way to upgrade Bitcoin, and we will probably see several soft forks, one each couple of years.

The last soft fork was Taproot in 2021, and yes that's already some time ago but was after 2018. There was not much controversy around this SF so there was no "Bitcoin-NoTapRoot" hard fork or so, at least none I'm aware of.

Several soft forks are actually planned, the most important one in the near future would be one einabling covenants (enhancing technologies like Ark, sidechains, BitVM and even Lightning a lot) but there is still no consensus among developers which exact covenant technology to implement (OP_CAT - BIP 347, OP_CTV - BIP 119, and OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACK - BIP 348 are probably the most well known ones).