When I think of Americans who were alive then and younger, or who weren't born, looking at it as a historical event, it boggles my mind. Everything about this country has been deformed and twisted, every aspect of the society you live in from security theater at the airport to the militarization of local police, all that hardware, to the way the giant internet sites function now (or don't), to all the conspiracy-fueled madness that led to 1/6/21, which is the only other day that began to feel like 9/11. All of it started that day, it's the moment when we entered the wrong alternate universe.
THAT is an interesting, and wildly speculative, take.
It's speculative, yea. But without 9/11 I don't think we'd have a culture of giant military style pickup trucks rolling coal and waving flags (American or Confederate). I think the militia movement of the 90s would have stayed much more contained and minor without something to justify their claims of conspiracy and NWO takeover. And I think we wouldn't have developed the sense that we were all living in a disaster movie, and become so callous and inured to what we see on the news. I don't think I can or should summarize all this in a post, but maybe the best way to put it would be that it ended the American Century, and bent the arc of our civilization towards decay and self destruction. It exposed a crack in the foundation of the country that has grown, and keeps growing. I suppose that could have happened any number of ways.
So not totally far fetched I'd say.
[1] https://pca.st/episode/6deccd04-ca45-404b-8537-c4bbe73fedb9