Ah, you mean those halcyon days when China blew up a satellite in 2007 to demonstrate its anti-satellite military capabilities and caused a huge debris field?
Space Force is just an org chart change. There is nothing new that wasn't already being done before.
There was never a point in time where spaceflight wasn't militarized to some degree. Even France has a space force. The US Space Force isn't some lurch towards militarism, it's a glorified bureaucratic reshuffling of what the DoD was already doing.
They used to have at least pretend they weren't doing it, because there was popular demand to avoid it. I miss those days. When we believed this was possible, and there was demand for it, hope for it, and it was a real topic for international treaties, and governments had to figure out how to do it anyway. I'm not talking about 2007, but earlier. The evidence of that period is in the OP, that's the era he's talking about. Now nobody hopes for anything but forever war everywhere.
I am nostalgic for when some tribes of hunter-gatherers in middle east presumably resisted militarization.