Bitcoin Cash was a blatant attempt by Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan (co founders of Bitmain) to split the fledgling bitcoin community and sell more mining equipment. They spent millions pushing Bitcoin Cash trying to make it a real competitor. With their mining equipment and low difficulty rate on the BCH chain, they held nearly all the BCH in the early days, and desperately needed to create a market place for it. No. BCH is most certainly NOT a white hat op, unless you believe the white hats needed the Chinese to make it work.

BSV is even worse. Craig Wright is the world's worst scam artist, laughably trying to convince people that he was Satoshi, when he can't even be remote placed with Nick Szabo. While nobody is 100% sure what person or group represents Satoshi Nakamoto, Bayesian Analysis of the writings in the early days shows that Nick is almost certainly one of the people who wrote the early emails under the pseudonym.

And what was the big controversy back then?

Whether or not to make larger blocks so more transactions could be included at a cheaper price (BCH), or whether they wanted to keep the existing block size and separate out some non essential components to allow more space inside the traditional 4MB size (BTC). There were technical reasons for both approaches. If keeping the 4MB block size and going to SEGWIT was a black hat operation, it was a damn good one, because there was very little psychology involved in the discussions during those days. They were purely technical discussions about the plusses and minuses of both sides. But the real reason I think BTC won out is precisely because Bitmain was so hated. As soon as they publicly sided with BCH, the deal was sealed.