BIP148 in my opinion which he was pushing for while misleading people into believing forking bitcoin with no hashrate support is ok and is not going to split bitcoin.
actually luke JR in late 2015 proposed segwit2mb could activate without splitting the network.
Luke then backed out and pretended he was nothing more than a insignificant janitor/chimnet swep very early 2016 and could not possible code segwit2mb into core.
then came the segwit1x and they tried that in november 2016 hoping to activate by christmas 2016.. yet by spring 2017 it only got 35%, because it was only segwit1x. not the segwit2mb(2015 agreement)
what came next was to ensight some social discord with a 3 card shuffle trick.
the bip148 did actually occur on august first. the blockchain itself can attest to that.
but your explanation of it is wrong.
bip148 is about mandating that hashrate flag approval for segwit1x or find themselves thrown off the network on august first.
meaning 148 was a AT REAL CODE LEVEL a controversial hardfork(pre activation mandated approval or else) to fake approval for segwit1x (but social dramatised as a 'user assisted soft fork'... they even made hats to hide the real controversy it caused)
another of the card tricks was the investors paying luke and samson mow and others to get segwit active. falsely offered a segwit2x(not segwit2mb). this was the NYA where they employed BLOQ devs to write a client.. but this was not a real proposal to get 2x active, but a ploy to get 1x active by saying 2x would only activate later if 1x gets activation first.
the other card trick was bitcoin cash. as the alternative choice network to funnel x1 opposers off the network, making 1x opposers feel they had somewhere to go to rather than fight off 1x.
if you follow the portfolio of DCG and see blockstream, bloq, NYA agreed parties, and yes even ver, were all tied togther.. youll see the 3 card shuffle that got 1x activated ven though there was 35%-65% controversy over it.
anyway. moving on. years later bitcoin scaling hasnt really happened we are stil below the 600k transactions a day threshold(7tx/s) and it seems all the devs and the DCG portfolio care about now is the commercialisation of LN to give investors returns on investment. while trying to 'deburden' bitcoin of utility.
anyway, i think that this social drama of lukes this week is just a psy-op of reverse psychology to later say that onchain scaling cant happen because luke proved that devs have no power.. yet. we all know that now core is in power. that if devs were serious about something they could easily pull the pin and activate whatever they like.. as shown august 2017