History

I agree.

I do think that the joke is very funny, but only because some people are upset that their favorite faction is gone, which is not in itself a problem. However, it is a symptom of the problem.

Fallout is about a lot of things: it's a parody of 1950's American culture, it's a survive-the-post-apocalypse-using-violence fest, and it's a reflection on what is America. The first two are fun, cathartic, and easily accessable. This is why Bethesda always brings them to the forefront.

Asking what is America is harder, both to write and consume. The New Vegas factions did a great job of showing how different people would try to rebuild America. Bethesda is only interested in the most villainous in Vault-Tec (who spent centuries experimenting on people) and The Enclave (a group who wants to re-conquer America and run a capitalist, racist, fascist state). The show depicts the New California Republic as a utopia. Whereas in the games it is a deeply flawed democracy. On the one hand, it provided social services, banned slavery, and fought against the brutality of groups like The Enclave and Caesar's Legion. On the other, it forced independent farmers to become wage slaves and expanded to steal resources while claiming to spread freedom and democracy.

The tagline of Fallout is: "War never changes". In my opinion, this is supposed to mean that the new countries that arise after the destruction of the USA will just repeat the same mistakes; regardless of what they copy from America's libertarian, imperial, fascist, or capitalistic tendencies. The bigotry continues. The resource wars continue. The destroying lives for personal profit continues.

Bethesda seems to think that "war never changes" means that the Wasteland never changes. Overturned cars sit in the streets just outside of a city of 35,000 which has thrived for 90 years. As you mentioned, in 200 years no one had built a house fancier than leaning scrap metal. Any counties or city-states created by other writers need a plot reason to no longer exist. That way the world can forever stay in a Walking Dead-esque state filled with monsters and people who became even more monstrous.

What I don't understand is why Bethesda keeps making each new entry further along in the timeline. If they want to tell the-world-just-ended stories, just set it soon after the bombs fell in a different city. It seems so simple to me and it fixes the nothing-has-changed-in-200-years problem.