My experience is that if something diverges too far from OTL, the general reaction is to protest the fact that it is so different that the author could very well be making everything up.
You don't get my point. My point is: since when was OTL a yardstick for judging the realistic of other timelines? I think that there are more diverging timelines than converging. I also think that there are more dystopian timelines and utopian ones. There are more crazy worlds than sane ones. It takes more of an effort to build than to destroy. I know one thing about humanity, their tendency to be brutal, destructive, and not so very sane, and it takes a ginormous amount of effort for any civilization to possibly overcome these inherent downward trends.
OTL is looking pretty ASB as well. A small part of the world, Western Europe, being able to conquer almost every single other civilizations, in the Americas, Africa, and Asia from the 16th to 19th centuries? Totally Europe wank.
And if you had told me about the Great Reset a mere 5 years ago, I would have dismissed it as very unlikely, but look where we are now! Well now I know that mass death scenarios, once regarded as ASB scenarios, may happen quite a bit more often than we maybe thinking. There are decades when more things change than in the preceding several hundred years, that's for sure.
I am also within the category of people who think that the collapse of the Soviet Union without even putting up much of a fight, would be extremely unlikely. If you would have mentioned this during the cold war, it would be regarded as ASB or American wank. So OTL is already looking ASB, by OTL standards! In my opinion something like Red Alert would have been more likely.
What you said about Red Flood and TNO being unrealistic in your opinion, my answer would be the following. In periods of stability you would see very little change. In periods of instability or chaos, you have a much greater chance of timeline disturbances. If you are familiar with chaos theory, you would know that a small little disturbances, such as you killing a butterfly, would have drastically diverging effects the farther forward in time you go. So in periods when "Pax Romana" is disturbed, you will have a splintering of timelines. Indeed you have more different timelines splintering in periods of instability than in periods of stability. The start of the 20th century was one such period, which is where Red Flood and TNO came from. The end of the 20th century and start of the 21st century were another such period. And the 2020s are a third such period of instability. And each such period of instability generated diverging timelines.
PS:
I personally believe that the Multiverse is akin to a computer simulation which traces out all possible occurring scenarios. Meaning that as long as it's not prohibited by the laws of physics, it will happen. Michio Kaku wrote in his book, "everything that isn't prohibited is mandatory". Meaning that the Multiverse will eventually simulate even very unlikely timelines, to come into being. The implication here is that every single timeline that we write, even the Draka ones, exists somewhere in the Multiverse, and is no less real than OTL, complete with living souls. These conjectures are in line with modern theories of physics. Einstein was wrong, God does indeed "play dice" with the world, and every event, no matter how unlikely, will occur. The Multiverse isn't even logically coherent. It doesn't have to be though. There is no anthropocentric principle that reality adheres to, to conform with the skeptic's expectations of what reality should be like.
