The segwit+bitcoin cash fork was a technically very complex situation. Miners loved the Bitcoin cash fork as bigger block sizes centralize the system (makes block transfer time longer, which makes it easier to do selfish mining and harder for small miners to take part of the system, especially through TOR relay). Read the blocksize wars book (I listened to the audiobook and loved it) for an in depth explanation, it’s awesome.
Also Bitmain was using covert ASICBOOST: the Merkle-Damgard construction allows reusing the first part of the SHA256 computation, but Segwit broke that unofficial internal optimization that Bitmain was using for mining.
In that fork companies and miners thought that they can change the verification rules, as many people are just looking at the chain with the longest proof of work, not real full nodes. What they didn’t realize that with Bitcoin people who are long term holders with significant amount of money understand how crucial it is to run their own full nodes to verify all the rules, and just use miners for deciding the order of the transactions (instead of the rules to follow as well).
I personally sold all of my Bitcoin cash the first time I could make a Bitcoin cash transaction and bought Bitcoin with it (which wasn’t easy, as it had problem with difficulty adjustment).
The market is working slowly: people right now don’t understand how difficult is to run their own Ethereum full node (I wanted, but it’s incredibly hard to even get a description of how to do a full verification from the genesis block).
The main problem with the altcoin ecosystem is that exchanges make money of people transacting altcoins instead of just holding 1, so people get into the altcoin casino, losing lots of money (I have friends who have done this sadly). Sadly market works by smart and patient people taking advantage over other people (I try to help people to stay Bitcoin only, but it’s incredibly hard with some people, especially men…my female friends invest less money, but hold much more patiently, and get rewarded).
Lastly about the societal collapse: it is happening with fiat currencies anyways. I see the current CO2 emission problem as a $10T-$50T problem, while the inflation of fiat currencies as a $500T problem. Bitcoin will solve the inflation problem in 10 years (it has a yearly 2x adoption rate), and I believe people will care more about the environment after they don’t have to worry about paying their rent every month while working off their ass.