Support was at around 40 percent. Then BIP-148 came along and threatened to disconnect any nodes that relayed blocks that were not signaling for segwit. At that point, you either signal or stop mining, so miners signaled. They were also encouraged by strong support (90%+) for the segwit2x agreement, which turned out to be a joke.
As I recall, this BIP wasn't merged in any official bitcoin-core clients. You'd have to download alternative versions or patch it yourself. UASF-supporting nodes were by no means dominating the node-network to be a threat. At least that's how I saw it while connecting for my daily sync. Perhaps the s2x was more of a motive.
There is a very large community of bitcoiners besides Wu involved with BCH. If you never venture out of bitcointalk.org or /r/bitcoin, I can't blame you for being blind to it. Censorship tends to create echo chambers, to the detriment of the people in those chambers. I never made the claim that BCH is Bitcoin. Clearly that moniker is more closely associated with the Segwit chain. But that may change with time.
My claim is that BCH is more closely aligned with Satoshi's whitepaper. At 1MB and with 2 week difficulty adjustment, the segwit chain is much more fragile than BCH. BCH's mempool has not ever seen backlog and now that the difficulty adjustment algorithm has been upgraded, blocks times are much more reliable than the segwit chain.
BCH is much more centralized, plus it's at the mercy of any script-kid wanting to spam it for peanuts and fill it with gigabytes/day of spam. Just because it hasn't happened, doesn't mean it can't happen. I would probably do it myself for 24hrs or so, just to make an "academic" point that the "mempool is full" bullshit and "we need an upgrade" can equally apply to a 8mb chain if one goes out and spams it. I guess other people too had this thought, but there is also the thought that people who want to sell their BCH will be prevented if they have to download endless gigabytes.
The marketing being pushed by the same crew is about the peer-to-peer e-cash system, with emphasis on the e-cash aspect. Centralization changes the first aspect: As people become unable to participate as peers, you go from peer-to-peer to a client/server model. You go towards the cash system a bit more (a few more tx/s while global requirements are in excess of XX.XXX tx/sec - which ultimately don't make a dent towards the cash-goal), but you recede way more in terms of p2p characteristics. If it's not a decentralized peer to peer system, then who cares?
THIS is the novelty of bitcoin. Not the 10 minute transactions. If people wanted a client/server system, they have paypal and it can do instant txs.
Even the cash-aspect of BCH promising "faster" txs is problematic. I mean if you want to go faster, you can do it like Litecoin (faster blocks). 10m blocks (on avg - could be 1hr if the difficulty is high) aren't good enough to buy you a coffee. Even 2.5m (LTC) aren't good enough - you'd need something like dash's system, or a pre-funded lightning channel.
Anyway...