i think a lot of alt history writers/creators have a bad habit of overemphasizing the impact of the individual, and forgetting or ignoring the momentum of the world. social, economic, political, environmental, and technological or scientific forces are all bigger than one person. People will claim that if Einstein had died in childhood we never would have discovered relativity, but ignore the fact that he was able to discover relativity because it was ripe to be discovered. Yes, he was a genius, he was incredibly smart and the world would have suffered from his loss, but someone would have figured it out, and it probably would have still been within a decade, maybe two at the most, because the larger factors that laid the groundwork for its discovery, that the problems solved and questions answered by relativity, were still in motion, in force, were still being encountered and presenting challenges that had to be addressed, and another brilliant person would have gotten there eventually. Same with economic conditions, same with any great invention or discovery, same with large scale social movements. If Henry Ford had not been born, the car would not have failed to exist, it would just exist a little differently. Climate change would not have been stopped, it would just have proceeded a little differently. It's not that things would have turned out exactly the same, not in the least! but a lot of alternate history fantasies love to say "if this person was not in the right place at the right time, the whole world would be radically and fundamentally different", and they fail to identify the larger forces at work that would have limited the impact of the individual.
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