Core devs like Gregory Maxwell inflated numbers to control narrative, still happening today

There were roughly 15–17k publicly reachable Bitcoin nodes in mid-2017. At its peak before August 1, around 1,700 listening nodes were signalling for BIP148, representing roughly 10–12% of publicly reachable nodes. Prior to the last-minute industry shift toward BIP91/SegWit2x in the second half of July, only about 1–2% of global hash rate (primarily Slush Pool) had publicly committed to BIP148-compatible mining.