If lack of near unanimous consensus on a major decision is enough to kill bitcoin, then bitcoin was never a good idea to begin with.
Bitcoin was designed with the assumption that there will be major decisions that must be made even in the absence of near-unanimous consensus.
Protocols, not just bitcoin, don't work in the absence of consensus. One peer expects certain behavior from another peer, and if that isn't the case, the protocol doesn't work as intended. You can't have one peer saying that the block size is X, the other saying no it is Y and the block is invalid, or that the number of coins is A and another saying no it is B trying to invalidate A.
In order for protocols to work properly, practically everyone using them has to agree on what is valid and what isn't valid behavior. If a modified http or smtp server uses messages that a client doesn't understand, a page won't work or an email won't get sent. That's what's at stake here, hence the incompatibility of the various "implementations", hence the possibility of forking in at least 3 incompatible coins (the stalled chain, a BU chain, a BTC-different algo chain). If this proceeds, then any disagreement can be used by bad actors in the future to create more and more forks, until BTC becomes a joke.
The primary issue that needs to get fixed in bitcoin is not scaling. It's removing the possibility of contentious forks through "disagreements", which represent an open attack vector against bitcoin itself.
As for the price action, it reminds me of the 400 range when the prior fork FUD was ongoing and people were like "who bought at 380, price should be at 200 or lower".