A definition of hard forks and soft forks that I had heard and that was useful for me as a layman is that a soft fork doesn't change the rules to the point where old nodes stop understanding the change as Bitcoin. They alter the code in a way that the old ones will still understand it as Bitcoin, even if it seems strange to those nodes. A hard fork, on the other hand, changes things so much that it becomes something else, to the point where nodes diverge and follow completely different paths. That's what you described; I just wanted to show how I heard and learned it because along with that comes the explanation of why Bitcoin is the best currency—because besides not having a creator controlling the code, it doesn't undergo drastic changes based on majority appeal. I think in this case they used the term "soft fork is a 51% attack" as a reference and to grab attention; I don't understand it to be the same thing.