As the parent poster said, there was a majority consent. Much more than 50% considered that this was okay, they also "joined the fork", so the things that these <15% did were done with majority not objecting.

And also it's quite plausible that if the same number of people, the same people would implement a technically identical hard fork with the same process but with a different "socioeconomic" result and justification, then they wouldn't have gotten the same majority consent that they did in this case.