Forks are arbitrary. There's no need to literally gather 51% consensus, it just means users of Fork A are in an entirely different universe than Fork B and that's fine.

For example when BTC split into BTC and BCH, for me the ticker for Bitcoin went from BTC to BCH because BCH was the continuation of "real bitcoin". And the absurdly-small-blocks crowd obviously felt the opposite. And that's completely fine.

One of the most pernicious beliefs of the BTC crowd is that a hard fork is some evil, unforgivable thing. It shows a total misunderstanding of how free software works.