If you were going to stop Bitcoin in such a fashion, you would do exactly what has happened with Blockstream: Hire the top devs and put things in place to prevent it from being usable.
The most obvious was taking advantage of the fact that Satoshi had left a 1mb limit in the code. From this, an entire “scaling debate” was concocted. A very bizarre narrative
I hear all the theories. The fact remains, the miners, businesses and users determine which client is used. Knowing all this, why aren't they switching to Bitcoin Unlimited?