Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you show when this has successfully happened? Can you show a popular coin that the devs went one direction with, a different group didn’t like, forked, and became more used than the original?
CryptoNote It is the predecessor to Monero, development there stalled in politics, and some people forked Monero. Admittedly, it wasn't very big when the split happened. I'm not sure of the capitalization.
The discussion is when did a coin - fork into a different coin and become more successful than it's predecessor?
Because if it's "well, never... yet!", then the argument that "development is centralized but that's ok because you can just fork it if you don't like the developer's plans" - is effectively a lie.
Also, while I probably know way less than you on this overall, I do know Monero has seen successful because it's effective to be run as a scam on victim computers (mining malware) and on websites that use JS on your computer to mine coin. Almost all the web and malware mines Monero. It gives me the impression as the least legitimate coin I can think of because of the number of times I've seen this.