Checks basically don't exist in Japan, Belgium, Germany, or Sweden.
I have no idea about the proposed alternate timeline, because I simply don't know enough about how the US banking systems functions or dysfunctions, but I do have an anecdote to illustrate just how rare cheques are in Germany.
A few years back my health insurance was legally obligated to pay all their members some money back.
Now there were a ton of ways they could have accomplished that, like for example transferring the money back exactly to where it came from or simply taking less the next few times they took your money until everything was evened out.
They choose instead to send cheques by mail.
Maybe they hoped that many of their customers would throw the letter away due to not knowing what to do with it. (A lot of people did.)
I would like to say that I am not that stupid, but I only became aware of the cheque because a family member who is with the same insurer phoned me and told me not to throw that letter away.
Intrigued by the whole thing, I took the cheque to my bank to see if they could turn it into money. The first person I spoke to had no idea what to do about this piece of paper, so they called for backup. That backup wasn't quite sure how to proceed either so they called a third person for help.
In the end it took three people to figure out how to process the cheque correctly.
It was simply something so obscure that they so rarely encountered it that they had to look up the correct procedure. Too much had changed since cheques were commonly used.
A few weeks later I heard on the news that the whole thing had caused lots of trouble all around and the insurance company was now going to transfer the money the proper way to anyone who hadn't successfully managed to cash their cheque.
So the takeaway from that is that cheques may still be legal and valid ways to transfer money here, but nobody uses them anymore.