No it's called a hard fork because it is not backwards compatible. Older versions of the software are forked off the network. A soft fork is backwards compatible.

Hard forks only become hard to do when there is disagreement on what the developers added and/or misinformation. Hard fork 17 on steemit would be one such attempt that failed when the witnesses were against all the changes the devs wanted. Bitcoin core/blockstream and their censorship spreading lies that the chain would surely split if the block size were increased would be a good example of misinformation and FUD spreading preventing a simple hard fork for years.