Since people have started mentioning non-countries that are also overrated, I'll add another: disease vs Native Americans. An increasing number of work in history of the Americas is showing that the narrative of "the Native Americans lacked immunity and simply died" is lacking a bit of nuance when you dig into it, seeing as these epidemics also occurred in the context of large scale population displacements, the conquest of native polities, trade route disruption, and a lot of other problems. Pointing out that "X many Taino people in Hispaniola died of smallpox" has to take into account that they likely would have been immunocompromised from malnutrition, for instance. Of course it would also be factually incorrect to suggest that disease played no role whatsoever in destroying indigenous populations, but I find that a lot of threads discussing post-contact Americas lack a nuanced discussion of how harmful these epidemics may be in the event of a less violent contact, or really any ATL contact, which makes me sad as a former biochemist.
It also suggests that diseases like smallpox always existed in one super-virulent form that was going to kill Native Americans on contact, when viruses are always evolving and the most virulent form didn't evolve until the 1580s IIRC. In addition, there was a less virulent strain called variola minor which kills only about 1% of patients yet also confers immunity to its destructive cousin variola major, which due to its lower mortality rate rapidly outcompeted variola major by the time smallpox was eradicated. Given that variola minor most likely evolved due to selective pressure from the widespread adoption of inoculation, one could come up with a realistic POD in which inoculation becomes much more widespread in the Old World before it did OTL, not unimaginable given that dates for its invention range from the 10th to the 15th centuries and given its simplicity. Variola minor evolves earlier than OTL due to the same selective pressure, outcompetes its cousin, and when ATL contact happens smallpox isn't much of a killer, and even that only lasts until they learn inoculation from a missionary.
Apologies if this is a hit-and-run comment that's also arguing against a popular conception but I largely wrote this to procrastinate IRL work.