Pop culture loves the 'butterfly effect' and gets it wrong

You're underestimating the effect now. You only have to play about with a simple chaotic function and see how quickly the most infinitesimal change leads to utterly different results to appreciate that a butterfly flapping its wings sufficiently in advance literally alters the course of all subsequent tornados.

If your home had a 99% chance of making it through tornado season unscathed one year but for the flap of a butterfly's wings, then it may still have a 99% chance, however it would be a completely new role of the dice.

Major inventions often have several people making the same basic discovery at the same time. You can’t build heavier than air controlled flight without efficient engines. You can’t build efficient engines without high precision manufacturing. Which requires it’s own constraints etc.

Replay the last 30 years and Dell might not have been the mail/phone then internet order PC vender to become a household name. But, one of them would because several where trying and efficiency of scale is a major advantage.

PS: One if my favorite examples is in a high school science class I was messing around with a power supply and mechanical pencil lead. It ended up making a rather bright light, in a moment of wonder I realized I had become possibly the millionth person to discover a precursor light bulb. Well over a hundred years late by on measure but in terms of the 100,000’s of years history of humanity fairly close.

Let's say 99 times out of 100, a delay of a few seconds doesn't impact whether one person is conceived.

There's a pretty big gulf to cross from that, to 'an entirely different set of people in one generation.'

As far as we know, no causation goes faster than light, so even if the "small change" was "an utter tide of total destruction of all matter", most of the observable universe can't be affected.

Someone born from the same batch of sperm, with parents at the same stage in their lives, is likely to be pretty similar.

There may be significant differences at the individual level e.g. a child of a different gender is born to a family with certain ideas about gender roles, or stillbirths/miscarriages/disabilities occur or fail to occur due to this falling branch, but in aggregate, the people of the next generation will be pretty similar to the ones who would have existed otherwise.

A lot of inventions get attributed to individual geniuses, but in many cases society was ripe for them, if Joseph Swan didn't exist, or became a ballet dancer instead, we would still have had electric light bulbs around the same time.

I am not just the product of my parents, but of the centuries of history of society leading up to now.

So in a few generations, you are right that all those small changes will result in all the people being different, society as a whole is likely to be fairly similar.

Even before error correcting codes we would have just got a crash and rebooted. This universe with a sightly angrier developer would still most likely be the same once he vented it out with a few swear words.

People once were looking for signs in the skies, and acting upon it to inject chaos into their lives, but random act of chances take time to make an impact whereas Order is effective and to the point.

Once the world has favored order over chaos, it builds itself to be resilient to small changes, it submit itself to the law of large numbers, and once it has mastered it, it submit itself to the rules it has chosen for himself.

That may be the great filter of Order to explain the Fermi Paradox. Order is so effective, that it can convince itself there is no Fermi Paradox using basic statistics, and march in order towards its own doom, because the doom is in the order itself. Hopefully once we storm area 51 in September, we will know for sure that aliens exist and that there is no reason to worry about Order being a great filter.

Take the problem from the other perspective, imagine you are given the opportunity to re-roll something in the world, but just one single thing locally to create a brand new universe, would you still choose to break a branch in a random forest ? Would you try to find a camel just before the last straw breaks its back, just to see the camel owner pick-up the fallen straw once again. At what point in time should you rollback for the world to be receptive to your divine intervention ?

The world would look more-less the same.

We like to ascribe inventions to lone brilliant geniuses, but the truth is, inventions are made on schedule. Whenever the "time is right", all the necessary preconditions are met, someone makes the invention. Usually multiple people simultaneously, but we tend to credit the first one that manages to tell the world about it. In our timeline, relativity is attributed to Einstein, but if a time traveller killed him when he was a child, someone else would still have published more-less the same thing around 1905. Maybe some time later.

Similar things seem to apply to economies too. People predominantly follow incentives, and those don't tend to flip randomly.

So if you traveled back in time a hundred years and thrown a rock at a random squirrel, the world today might be populated by completely different set of actors, but the scene would be roughly the same.