The likely reason Segwit was activated when it was is because there was a movement by non-2X supporters to forcibly activate it around that date, and the 2X sid

The likely reason Segwit was activated when it was is because there was a movement by non-2X supporters to forcibly activate it around that date, and the 2X side blinked first. It's as simple as that. Also, 2X is inherently harder to deploy than Segwit because it's a hard fork, which means that everyone everywhere would have to upgrade their software. Even the proposed timeline for 2X was quite aggressive - more so even the BIP-50 upgrade back in 2013, which unlike 2X was entirely uncontroversial and absolutely necessary because nodes running the old version would end up stuck on different forks from each other.