it tends to give the chills because it's indeed a very harsh, cold and unforgiving assignment of meaning, being as it is a Maths verdict and nothing else

Fwiw, I never found it any more cold or chilling than, say, gravity and momentum. If it's a force of nature then respect it and maybe learn to harness it -- or don't, but then don't go blaming the force for the predictable results.

Unfortunately bitcoin isn't fully mathy that way, what with mining cartels; and that the soft forks have held thus far is to my eye the most direct and obvious proof that at least one big one exists. Whether because "duped" or "enemy" is perhaps not yet clear, though I'd think at the very least the larger pool operators ought to have known better.

Hence you get "transactions without signatures" trying to export some authority to the "witnesses" as if something outside the blockchain could ever have authority on Bitcoin transactions

This sheds light on why it got popular besides the seemingly not that compelling "slightly cheaper transactions", as well as the embrace of the seemingly arcane and unsexy brand name. "It sets the stage to make things more like the squishy fiat legal system that we think we're accustomed to (for want of actual experience with it) and flatters our desire that the world run on woulds, coulds and shoulds."

When the day of reckoning does come, they'll claim Bitcoin "was hacked"

This sounds like the best case scenario, e.g. someone busting the mining cartel and collecting the booty; the alternative "reckoning" is more the slow grind from a hard world of steel and stone structures to a soft one of mud huts, and by the time the crowd notices its poverty the decay is so far advanced that few will manage to connect it to the earlier causes.

It makes sense that the forks are a reaction to the cold Bitcoin reality that, "he who has the money to spend, may spend for any reason ~whatsoever~, he who doesn't have the money to spend, may not, full stop."

Then in the short-term, after duping the miners, they feel they get to parade around claiming they've made it "safer" (multi-sig) and "more inclusive" (segwit), eschewing all along that, no, they didn't actually get the nodes to accept their nonsense.

When the day of reckoning does come, they'll claim Bitcoin "was hacked", must "upgrade" and take all our other nonsense as per footnote 18.

Bitcoin transactions are simply statements of coin movement from one address to another ("this amount of coins moves from this address to that address"). Similar to any other statements anywhere else, Bitcoin transactions don't contain any implicit meaning by themselves - the meaning (if any) flows from a relevant source of authority. In the case of Bitcoin, that source of authority is the network of nodes: the meaning of a transaction is directly given by and strictly dependent on it being part of the longest chain. Hence, "there is meaning in the blockchain" but this is all there is and it tends to give the chills because it's indeed a very harsh, cold and unforgiving assignment of meaning, being as it is a Maths verdict and nothing else: make your statement to the network, await delivery of the verdict on its meaning and then... live (or die, as you prefer) with it as received, for it won't change in the slightest, whether you like it or not, whether you "agree" with it or not and in either case, there isn't at any time anywhere or anyone to appeal to.

Confronted with the above, all proponents of "improvements" in the vein of "transactions without signatures" simply aim to subvert, basically chipping away as much as possible from the very core of what Bitcoin is, while maintaining (and riding) the name. So there will be attempts to import (inject might be a better way to describe it) meaning and state in transactions trying to effectively bypass or at least reduce the authority of the network itself as unique source of meaning for transactions and the direct control of each individual signature over the coins at relevant addresses. Hence you get "coloured coins" as if coins could be in various states and should for some reason be processed differently. Hence you get "transactions without signatures" trying to export some authority to the "witnesses" as if something outside the blockchain could ever have authority on Bitcoin transactions or as if the meaning of a transaction was in the statement itself and unrelated to whether the signature is accepted by the network or not. Basically all soft forks can be described simply as an attempt to inject state and pretend meaning: let's add this or that situation in which all of a sudden the original rules don't have to be applied anymore but the rules *we came up with* should apply instead because reasons.

All such subversion attempts are done, of course, in the name of "making it better for everyone" despite there being plenty of voices against such "better" and despite history showing amply and repeatedly how it's exactly the "everyone" that ends up all the worse when falling for it. But the reckoning always comes with some delay and while the disruption is being subverted instead of put to use, the appearances are always rosy and there's less effort required to go with it than against it anyway so the "everyone" will flock to the supermarket today and then complain of hardship a couple of years down the line when "who could have predicted" such a thing and "what else is there to do anyway" etc.