Regardless of each individual project's survival, new projects are launched faster than they die. There are over 32 million cryptocurrencies. If a small fraction of that were built on Bitcoin we would already have increased the blocksize multiple times and would be looking much more like Ethereum. It's a tragedy of the commons.

Bloating the UTXO set is a real problem. Which is why Knots mitigates this. Core rejected the patch and redefined datacarriersize to call the bug a feature. Later redefining Bitcoin itself away from being a monetary system. Increasing the size of OP_RETURN doesn't magically fix this. With the consensus change we can fix both of these problems, plus others. I understand your concers over forking, threats, etc. Both sides are acting irrationally. Still we should find common ground and work together. We all want Bitcoin to live forever. It already solves the most important problem humanity currently faces. We can use other tools for other (far more simple) problems.