Good writeup and quite spot on.

I was covering the Bitcoin schism in some posts earlier, particularly The Big Reddit Bitcoin Schism, and Bitcoin Visions. It occurred to me that "bigblockers" and "smallblockers" shared the same visions, they differed on "how to get there". Came to think, you're quite right, for the very most I believe the biggest difference is "what charismatic leader do you believe in", or "what charismatic leader does your friends believe in". I believe very few actually took the time to objectively look into arguments from both sides.

This is something that happens from time to time, and it doesn't get better with Facebook and Reddit. Besides the Bitcoin schism, I also have personal experience with a similar incident in the Norwegian Pirate Party

The consequences can be really bad; so much energy and efforts spent on arguing, and so little on actually solving problems. People like me, I was a Bitcoin evangelist but due to the infighting and capacity problems I gave up, lost motivation and stopped promoting Bitcoins. Bitcoin market dominance fell from around 80% to around 30% due to the infighting and capacity problems. I think the crypto space as such has lost some 5-6 years due to this, perhaps we've lost the golden chance to get adoption for digital, permissionless and decentralized payment systems.

I also fully believe this happened completely without any conspiracies, though if a conspiracy is involved, I believe some clever PR-company has been manipulating people and opinions on both sides of the schism.