Why was a hardfork necessary to create BCH?

So BCH was created as a hard fork of BTC in order to increase the block size limit to overcome BTC's scaling limitations, but why was a hard fork necessary? Was it necessary ONLY because the miners didn't agree to a proposed change to increase the block size limit? Or was it necessary due to some technical limitation in the system, such as the change not being backwards-compatible or something?

That is, was the hard fork needed to work around a technical challenge or to work around a human decision problem?

submitted by /u/hakczar
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/bzn77l/why_was_a_hardfork_necessary_to_create_bch/