What is your gaming "alternative timeline"? Your gaming "what ifs"?

With the Red Dead 2 and Just Cause 4 coming out at the same time and having such incredibly different responses (Red Dead is perfect but slow, JC4 is a technical mess but totally crazy), it got me thinking, what if in another timeline. Avalanche had Rockstar's resources to make a Just Cause game; what if JC4 had the production value of RDR2?

While I was thinking about that, I thought of Factorio, a game I think of as from another timeline where instead of games advancing graphically they advanced in terms of systemic complexity. What if a game like that had Rockstar levels of production value? What if Rockstar levels of money and development time went into a city management or tycoon game? Would we see Dwarf Fortress levels of simulation along with Age of Empires level of historical development, given life with hi-fi and entertaining details?

The final example I thought of is the Dreamcast (I think) with it's superior sprite handling vs the Playstation with it's superior polygon handling. Looking back on those games, I think the industry rushed too quickly into 3D, with 2D games of that era holding up 10x better than the extremely low-fi 3D that was available to developers at the time. What if the industry had held back on 3D for a couple more years and given sprite work more time to shine? Even though we're kind of seeing that now in the indie scene with games like Owlboy, could you imagine how massive a 2D metriodvania with the budget of RDR2 could have been? More generally, what if less emphasis had been put on visuals and more on the complexity of interactions?

So while my alternative timelines are essentially "What if x had become as successful as the GTA/R*/RDR formula?", I'm curious to hear what other "What ifs?" the community has pondered and what they think the results may have been.