I think block size war is a contributing factor. If we account for all the contentious hard forks between 2015 and 2018, we will can trace vast majority to disagreement, particularly the case of block size limit.
To answer the question "What happened differently" I will simply say the Bitcoin ecosystem matured. The main tensions that caused forks have cooled off, and Bitcoin’s development has shifted toward incremental, backward-compatible upgrades, reducing the threat of contentious splits.
To answer the question "What happened differently" I will simply say the Bitcoin ecosystem matured. The main tensions that caused forks have cooled off, and Bitcoin’s development has shifted toward incremental, backward-compatible upgrades, reducing the threat of contentious splits.
Who's to say another contentious fork will appear if Bitcoin gets congested again? A few years ago, the Ordinals hype caused network fees to rise towards "uncomfortable" levels. Many expressed their disagreement with it, raising the possibility of Bitcoin getting "forked" again. Bitcoin Knox could've turned into a new chain, if successful. The lead developer (Luke Dashjr) proposed censoring Ordinals inscriptions on-chain via the node software. Glad it didn't work out, otherwise, the community would've been going against Bitcoin's censorship-resistant ideals.
While the odds of a new fork happening now are slim, anything is possible in the future. Money talks, so everything will depend on how interested investors and the community are to make a fork happen. One would hope, exchanges honor customers' funds on forked chains for "free money". Although, I don't think they're legally obligated to do so. Just my two sats.
