That is a strawman argument, I didn't claim this is a different timeline, in fact I claimed just the opposite. Altered is not the same as Alternate. Key events that are remembered and influential are still intact, while superficial details like whether NX-01 was named Dauntless or Enterprise deviate with little consequence.

I'd take up that wager they used the same actor for zefram cochrane to do the traditional new series handoff, they cast him as involved in the NX-01's multi decade development program before he disappeared.

Except total unaltering is impossible you can put the big history book events back into place (ie zefram cochrane invented the human iteration of warp drive) but the butterflies are still set loose (ie zefram cochrane was told about the enterprise-E by time travelers and was shown it through a telescope in order to gain his trust and cooperation, a century later a hitherto unmentioned ship of the same name and rough silhouette would be launched supplanting Dauntless as the name associated with the NX-01 registry.) Our time travelers don't notice the differences when they return home because they are so far removed from the altered events that the fog of history essentially covers things up.

You're moving the goalposts asking for such explicits beyond what is reasonable. Why would they need to spell it out for you in an interview when they have the actors say "these events weren't supposed to happen" repeatedly on screen? Are all viewers expected to familiarize themselves with every entertainment news article around and about a film or TV show in order to understand it? These things should be intuitive, and if what is intuitive isn't the writer's intent then that's just a failure on the writer's part.

This timeline is Altered not Alternate They did the same thing for First Contact, and ENT add just enough time travel to excuse not making the show into a history documentary yet none the less its considered part of the same story as everything that was made before but came later in the timeline.

ENT's trip to 1944 between seasons 3 and 4. Or in other words what must be the writer's "you made us make this temporal cold war cake and by koala we are gonna make you eat it" letter to the execs.

TNG had the strong implication that holodeck technology was pretty new, in the first season, at least at that level of sophistication.

It wouldn't be the first time TNG-1 would be retconned by DS9/VOY/ENT/TNG-3+ though. While less extreme It was a bit like the early DIS/PIC of its day.

Lower decks had a

There's these things called "stars" most planets with life on them have them very close by in the cosmic scale of things, and if you look up pictures of the ISS under one you'll see it's actually quite bright...

Maybe this also could help explain the Klingon changes in-universe

I was thinking this to they might refrence ENT's augment arc, the crews full of smooth heads we see in TOS, the fan theory of counter-augmentations and cosmetic surgeries, anything to smooth things over and bridge them together.

For me, having them look like TNG Klingons doesn’t even solve the problem because ENT had implied that shouldn’t happen until the TOS movie era. They could have rendered explicit the implication that not every Klingon was infected by the virus, but that still doesn’t support making the Klingons look how they did in s1 DIS.

Folks forget the klingon's made that Augment virus which then got loose in a lab breach. If they could do that to themselves on accident imagine what they'd do to themselves on purpose to try and compensate as the implications of the augment virus turn thier society upside down. There's much I don't like about Disco Klingons but the face redesign intrigued me as a potential reaction and over correction to the augment arc in ENT, and how past exchanges like that ultimately lead to federation vs klingon hostilities. Unfortunately Disco didn't capitalize on this probably cause if they start explaining things they'd ultimately have to admit they can't get away with haveing the longest heroship in canon...

I'm not really a fan of "it only looks overdesigned cause its supposed to be alien to you!" That they did with early Disco klingons and have done so far with SNW's Gorn. That line of thinking works for one off antagonists like V'ger, but these aliens are effectively supposed to be recurring characters and and making them and thier ships big balls of (sometimes asymmetric) noise means they all just start looking uniformly chaotic on top of being hard to replicate and recognize outside watching the show.