The funny thing is that most of the "small-blockers" who said "hardforks shouldn't be done, as they can cause a harmful chain split" later were rallying in support for UASF, apparently ignoring the fact that any attempt on forcing through a contentious soft fork with less than 50% mining support most likely would cause a harmful chain split. I think that's rather dishonest. It seems to me that the "hard fork"-terminology has been invented just for the purpose of keeping the current capacity limit unchanged, rather than the hard fork cost being the real reason why the capacity cannot be raised.
I tend to believe that deliberately failing to meet market demand is by far the biggest risk to Bitcoin. By now Bitcoin is down to around 33% market dominance according to coinmarketcap, that's dramatic! Only once before has it ever dipped below 50%.
What we're seeing now is an uncontrolled inflation in the crypto space, as people rather hold altcoins than Bitcoin. It would be OK if there was one dominant worthy competitor to Bitcoin taking over ... but it isn't, people prefer to invest in the newest crypto currency project in the space, hoping it will grow from near zero to a lot.