You can say it's all nonsense, and the people who indulge in it have a lot of time on their hands to waste, but "What if WWI never happened?" "What if the Germans won the 1914 war?" and "What if the US never entered WWI?" are classic counterfactuals, along with the ever popular "What if the South had won the Civil War?"
My guess is that these are the kind of questions people ask after particularly destructive wars. If it all seems like science fiction, it's very much that as well. The only SF I could stomach as a kid was the historical stuff: time travel and counterfactuals.
I enjoy that sort of thing as fiction, but to hear it expounded as established “fact” is something else altogether.
Didn’t Saturday Night Live used to run skits about that? I think I remember one: “What if Napoleon had had B-52s at the Battle of Moscow?”