Well instances were both painful but in my mind mostly affected a few core groups of devs, and a lot of the community was oblivious to anything going on. The Drupal 8 migration and subsequent forking of D7 into Backdrop caused a lot more consternation with smaller agencies especially.
I mostly did Drupal stuff with local and regional camps at the time, I was hired at Acquia slightly after, so I remember a lot of pain back then, especially as Wordpress and Drupal were often considered in the same meetings when building small local sites for nonprofits, small businesses, etc.
Nowadays it seems Drupal isn't part of the conversation unless there's a C-suite at the place building the website, it's moved upmarket quite a bit.