It was an attack; it was an attempted corporate takeover of Bitcoin that would have (eventually) killed Bitcoin's decentralisation.

And by criticising Garzik I wasn't intending to criticise ordinary ppl who sided with the Big Blockers back then. It was a confusing time. My criticism of Garzik was as a person who was a key player and who took it upon himself to change Bitcoin's core properties. He didn't have the wisdom and insight to make those changes and, it turned out, didn't even have the technical capability either. So he showed hubris, arrogance, disregard for the user base, and misjudgement of his own technical capability. Those are his flaws and not the flaws of ordinary ppl siding with him at the time.