You'll get many different responses to this question depending on who you ask. If you want to read into further i recommend you read the great scaling debate[1]. Its pretty long but does a fantastic job of summarizing the history.

In short the most popular reason for not having a block size increase (to allow many low fee transactions) was that it would increase the cost of running a full node, in turn centralising the network. More transactions would mean nodes would need a bigger hard drive and a better cpu to process the transactions. The small block camp wanted people to be able to run nodes on a raspberry pi. This theory is misguided in my opinion though, they chose to sacrifice cheap transactions to keep node running costs cheap.

[1]https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-deba...

Because Bitcoin works in a way that means miners, collectively, control the network.

They voted with their hash power against Bitcoin Cash when it forked, which was the “increase the limit” fork aiming at low fees and high number of transactions.

Those miners can now enjoy high fees as a result.