Oh boy, I could write a whole book about this!
How is bitcoin maximalism presently taken by everyone in bitcointalk? Is it still strong or is it beginning to become weaker after 10 years?
Perhaps the best way to explain it is by using examples and metaphors of the Republican party and its most notorious member (Trump).
A few notes before I begin explaining:
[1] I am not in any way implying that bitcoiners and nocoiners are similar to one or the other groups, I'm just drawing a comparison between them.
[2] Apologies for digging the dead out of the grave, but I chose Trump & conservatives for this example simply because most people are readily familar with him.
So you see Republican voters and conservatives, and you're a democrat/liberal and fundamentally disagree with their opinions. That's completely natural.
All bitcoiners who actively use bitcoins and altcoins are in a similar category. They are "moderates", people who don't mind what changes go inside the network as long as they don't adversely affect the way they use their money.
Of the maximalists category there are two different kinds, which I shall mention below:
The first is the "moderate maximalist". Politically speaking, there are similar to the republicans who (perhaps reluctantly) supported Trump, as opposed to, say, a rival republican, simply because they believed there was no better alternative in the red sphere - these are people who are quite horrified by some of his remarks, but they literally do not see another candidate who is more determined to fix the economy/country.
Most self-proclaimed maximalists fall in a similar category - they are happy with changes that improve the Bitcoin network, but care from little to none about what other people do on their own networks. Most likely they are against certain proposals for philosophical reasons, but not because their usage of cryptocurreny depends on them.
Because most maximalists are in this category, "moderrate maximalist" can be shortened to simply "maximalist".
Lastly, there are the fanatics. The people who would quite literally jump off a cliff if they saw Trump do it. In the bitcoin-sphere, I call these "extreme maximalists".
These represent people who insist the Bitcoin network be left exactly how Satoshi made it - with no soft forks that add rules & functionality of any kind [as a side note, this is how coins like Bitcoin XT/Gold/Unlimited/Cash/SV were made]. On the polar opposite, it also includes people who insist that a major archetectural change be made to the Bitcoin network at all costs. Like their political counterparts, it is very difficult to debate/negotiate with extreme maximalists as they have a tendancy to resort to personal attacks whenever their opinions are challenged.
Logically speaking, even people who exorbitantly denounce some coins in favor of others could be argued to belong in a similar category. The point is that, this category does not think in moderation with respect to the coins that they support (otherwise, they would be in the "moderates" category, but not in the "minimalists" category).
Of course, unlike politics, the crypto-sphere is not dominated by two parties. There are in fact more denominations of moderates, moderate maximalist, and extreme maximalist for each crypto currency. [examples: ETH/Ethereum Classic, Monero/Most monero derivatives, Bitcoin Cash/Bitcoin SV (LOL!), and others...]. So, crypto politics should not be viewed in greyscale, because it is a fully colorized picture with multiple hues
A similar case can be made for nocoiners - the "moderate", the "moderate maximalist", and "extreme maximalist" nocoiner with similar grades as those above for Bitcoiners (and the appropriate analogue for the political parties example).
The point is that nobody's the same, and lumping some of these groups together in the same denomination is wrong - for example, lumping together the maximalist categories, or simply all the denominations representing a particular coin as "the anticrist", is going to cause more emnity than actual work being done, as the guy in the news article must've discovered by now [for example: I don't like Max Keiser's conclusions about the economy, as I believe them to be too extreme, but do you see me running around the forum trashing him in my posts?]