This is a distorted retelling of history. Mining pools ultimately did settle on voting in favor of the hard fork, but did so through collusion and lack of transparency. Most notably, ethermine miners voted against the hard fork, but the pool operators contributed the entire pools votes in favor of the fork any way. There were similar situations with other mining pools, and in general the actual miners were left in the dark. The Ethereum Foundation was communicating with mining pool operators and exchange operators in private chats the entire time all of this was playing out.

Was the hard fork the right move in a pragmatic sense? Probably. But it was not at all the exemplar of decentralized consensus that people seems to remember these days. It was messy and ugly.