Maybe I'm too far out in left-field here, but since we're in an alternate universe why can't we have a completely new race we've never heard of before? Just because they exist in this universe doesn't mean they have to exist in the Prime Universe.
Well, the trouble is that the JJ Universe and the Prime Universe were the same place until 25 years before the filming. Where would a brand-new race come from in that little time?
I mean, go back to the year 1990 and make whatever change you like. I can believe you'd affect the courses of presidential elections, and that you could maybe make some factions stronger and some weaker. But could you make a brand-new country pop up in North America?
... I guess technically, like by a successful Quebec secession movement, or maybe some central American nations decide to merge or something like that. But it would be made out of the stuff we'd know and recognize from our timeline. We wouldn't be seeing a Dominion of Poyais popping up.
(Which isn't to say there can't be aliens that were nearby in Original Series time that we never heard of before, of course. We learned about a tiny fraction of what was around. Just that if the next movie introduces a brand-new alien, we can feel reasonably confident that they also existed in the Prime Timeline, just we didn't happen to hear of them.)
The two universes aren't exactly the same, there are vast differences. In the JJ-verse the Utopia Planitia ship yards are located on Earth. That is a very distinct difference. I think with the JJ-verse the rules of the Prime Universe do not apply. Why do events that occur in each universe have to occur at the same time? They don't. That's the joy of an alternate universe.