Every fork happens in order to effect some change – and whether that change is beneficial or not is the matter of policy, not technology.
Voting against a fork (with your mining power or wallet) is also a policy decision. You can't escape human nature in a system built and used by humans, not even in a very conservative/change-averse one, because conservatism is, once again, a human value, not a technological one.
Through backwards-compatible soft forks.
Nobody removed the ability to make non-segwit transactions. SegWit did not change the existing transaction format or change the chain, it repurposed the "anyone-can-spend" transaction space.
Unlike with a lot of other cryptocurrencies, the Bitcoin dev team bends over backwards to try to make sure their protocol updates extend the existing protocol rather than changing it.
And most critically neither issuance nor balances have been changed, with the exception of the isolated value overflow error that was corrected during Bitcoin's infancy in 2010.
> Every fork happens in order to effect some change – and whether that change is beneficial or not is the matter of policy, not technology.
It's a matter of individual opinion. And with Bitcoin, every individual user can assert their own opinion by running the protocol version that aligns most with their own opinion. You can't opt out of your bank's software update.
> Voting against a fork (with your mining power or wallet) is also a policy decision. You can't escape human nature in a system built and used by humans, not even in a very conservative/change-averse one, because conservatism is, once again, a human value, not a technological one.
I can't argue with that. Being a bitcoin user is inherently a policy decision.
Everyone makes a policy decision by clicking the "download" button. It's part of Bitcoin's strength and it's part of Bitcoin's weakness.