Monero’s development team has hard forks scheduled approximately every six months. The March 2018 fork isn’t out of the ordinary, and no drastic changes are being introduced, especially not a new coin. In fact, some of the Monero community wants to call these hard forks “network upgrades” to help keep hysteria to a minimum.
In general, Monero’s hard forks introduce new security features and protocol changes. This one adds some important proof-of-work changes to help maintain ASIC resistance, which has been part of the development team’s roadmap all along.
One reason this Monero fork has gotten extra attention is due to coin scams when a few hard fork projects appeared. Through a combination of sloppy journalism and copy/paste social media sharing, these projects have became synonymous with the original Monero, prompting a lot of users to falsely believe their beloved cryptocurrency was splitting like Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash did.