Ted Chiang does love to explore the counter-factual with empathy and openness where he somehow manages to take himself out of the story in the admirable Virginia Wolfe sense. The OP misses the biting critique hidden in these tales. For example Omphalos, Hell Is the Absence of God, and Tower of Babylon, can all be read as a devastating critique of religion. They all clearly articulate what the world would be like if certain religious beliefs were true. Since those worlds are nothing like our own, the beliefs are false. There is a strong element of cosmic horror in each of these stories that implicitly make a strong case that we are quite fortunate that our religions do not accurately describe nature.

Exhalation is one of my favorites. There is profound lesson about the nature of the mind, expressed simply as a sequence of discovery by a lone scientist in a very alien world. But the world is an idealized, simplified version of our own with much simpler source of work in the physics sense. I very much wanted to know more about the nature of that world, and for the people there to find a way out of their apocalyptic predicament. But that story, like it's world, is hermetically sealed perfection. The fate of our own universe is the same, but with more steps in the energy cycle and a longer timeline. The silence bounding that story is a beautiful choice, one that makes it a real jewel.