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Within a few days of the Balancer hack, Gnosis managed to get at least 51% if not over 66% of all gnosis validators in one room and soft fork (or censor or 51% attack) their own chain. In effect, transactions from and to a handful of addresses were censored. They were able to do this behind closed doors and communicated only after things have been accomplished (kind of understandable). For 6 weeks now until the hard fork, the vast majority of all gnosis validators ran closed source clients, as there was no public release for any of these upgraded (i.e. censoring) clients. The one team (Erigon) that published a release then tried to erase as much as possible again such that people do not see how the censorship was implemented. Nethermind did their release fully in private. I do not know anything about geth or Reth, but they are forked repos anyway under full control of Gnosis. There was also no discussion or vote if the hardfork should have been done at all.
As not all validators could update any transaction interacting with the censored addresses destabilized the network as non-censoring validators tried to include it in blocks and censoring validators then forked the blocks out again. Other non-censoring validators still had this valid transaction in their mempool and tried to include it again. This back and forth took about 15 minutes to die down. Each censored transaction would have cost the non-censoring validators quite some income. Interestingly, there were no adversarial transactions during the first 2 weeks of the censorship, I think my transaction was the only one testing the efficiency of the censorship. I then exited my validators and switched off my gnosischain nodes, so I did not follow if there was any more poking around by other people. I am pretty sure on Ethereum there would have been hundreds of people just sending transactions just for the fun of it and trying to poke holes in the censorship setup.
It is in my opinion not accurate to compare it to the DAO hard fork on Ethereum, as at least for the DAO hardfork, the discussion was public very early on and a heated discussion ensued. People could decide for themselves if the wanted to participate in the hard fork or not. History has shown that forking was the right decision for Ethereum at least. For the Gnosis hardfork this was very different the soft fork was decided behind closed doors and there was not public vote in any way afterwards for the hard fork. But hey, who needs a vote if over 50% already agreed to the fork. There is also no reasonable way to stay on the unforked chain. Most of gnosischains value is bridged through their bridge from Ethereum. Gnosis controls the bridge and decides which chain is the valid one. No place for another unforked chain. The only way option one had was to exit ones validators, which I did, and leave gnosischain.
The more interesting part is how it came that far. Gnosis worked tirelessly for several years to decentralize their chain. They incentivized solo stakers to run validators from home, gave away free validators to various groups with the goal get a good geographical distribution of node runners. This worked great and for me gnosischain was one of the few examples of a chain which managed to decentralize to a certain degree. This was true until stakewise launched their successful v3 on Gnosis chain. Within 1-2 years, over 52% of the staked GNO was on Stakewise and about 2/3 of that staked GNO is in 1 vault run by stakewise themselves, but distributed to 3 node runners. That is about 1/3 of all validators controlled by a single entity. All of the other larger stakewise pool operators also depend on Gnosis (the company) as Gnosis stakes a large portion of their treasury through Karpatkey on Stakewise. This lead to a massive dependency on a handful of actors and these actors could easily be brought in a single room to censor the chain and do a hardfork. I wrote in their discord a few weeks ago, that doing the hardfork is ethically the right thing to do if they can do it, but they should never have been able to do it at all, as this shows a massive centralization of the chain. Not sure what this means for the future of gnosischain, but as far as I have seen in the discussion some projects are asking questions about the neutrality of gnosischain going forward. Not sure if the expectation of maybe getting bailed out in case of hacks is enough to attract TVL especially if projects are afraid of getting censored for some reason. We will see if this sets a precedent for other hardforks and if they find a framework how to handle future hard forks. In the October community call, Friederike Ernst a Gnosis co-founder, also mentioned that they see gnosischain as decentralised enough, so it sounds like there won't be any more resources spent to actually decentralize gnosischain.

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