Disregards the majority? Although BIP-148 was controversial, SegWit was still wanted by the majority. It only became a necessary "movement", or a kind of "mechanism" for SegWit's activation, because Jihan Wu and the mining cartel were playing political games by using miner signalling as a political tool which delayed activation.
"want" can not be some abstract idea in a decentralized ledger. It must be explicitly expressed through voting and any proposal that requires/enforces a fork like BIP16, BIP148, BIP341, etc. must be activated after checking those votes. BIP148 does NOT do that!
In other words whether or not the majority wanted SegWit is irrelevant since BIP148 did not even care about that which is what leads to chain-splits!
Of course it doesn't do that and of course there were risks, BUT without the actual campaign for a UASF, there wouldn't have been a BIP-149, or the NYA, or the economic majority and the users wouldn't have started to have the urgency to want for SegWit to be activated. The miners would have delayed it further, playing political games by using signalling as their tool.
