I think that's another problem with trying to "align" Trek's history with our timeline. If you go back and watch DS9's "Past Tense," they didn't produce that episode as a prediction of sanctuary districts in our future. The ending of part 2 almost explicitly asks the audience to think about the issues and avert it.
They no more wanted sanctuary districts to align with our timeline than TOS writers wanted the Eugenics Wars and World War III to be future events.
As I've said, that's taking the motivation behind the change too literally. As Akiva Goldsman explained it in the interview, it's not about getting the facts and figures to line up; it's about showing the audience something that
feels like it could be in their own future, that's close enough to reality that they can imagine working to build something similar. The more distant the present feels from their own present, the less connection they make to it and the less relevant it feels to their own reality. It's not about getting every detail right, just about the overall impression it gives. It's about making it a reasonably close metaphor for our world, close enough to feel aspirational, rather than something so alternate that it feels detached from the audience's lives.
Because it's explained in the episode that it isn't a different timeline because of the Prophets' manipulations and their control of time. At the end of "Accession," Kira, Sisko and everyone else are unchanged and are aware that there was a point Akorem didn't finish poetry in the past and now there's finished poetry. Sisko didn't come back from the Wormhole to a station where events had moved 20 years into the future.
Again, it's a mistake to limit this to the question of whether the surface facts align. Facts in stories are arbitrary, since they're all made up. What matters is what narrative purpose they serve. That's why I brought up "Accession" -- not to say the in-universe facts or mechanism were the same, but to say the narrative intent of the storytellers of "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" was roughly the same, i.e. to change the distant past of the characters' universe in a way that maintained the same present aside from a few details. The point is that, narratively, they're still intended to be the same people, and that the vast majority of what the previous series/timeline established about them as characters is still valid.
I have 2 problems with the current direction. One is that I think it creates a narrative mess.
No, I think that narratively it simplifies things. Storytellers in ongoing universes, especially ones writing prequels and flashbacks, pretty much
always revise their details while pretending that the same events still happened in broad strokes. So that would happen anyway, and already has happened many times in
Star Trek. The only thing this does is to provide an in-universe handwave for what was already standard operating procedure for series writers. It's pretty much the same thing
Doctor Who did when it used the Time War to explain the continuity changes between the classic and revival series. It doesn't alter how the stories are told, it just lampshades it.
And the second issue is that I think if you like Strange New Worlds and Discovery, it makes it easier to dismiss them.
I think you mean to say if you dislike them? Anyway, how is that a change from before? There have always been fans who insisted that the newest Trek "didn't count" or was an alternate timeline because it didn't exactly conform to their expectations. That's happened like clockwork with every series and film revival since TAS. There are one or two people who have been active on this BBS within the past decade who still consider everything after ST:TMP apocryphal. This won't make anyone dismiss the shows; it'll just make the people who already dismissed them say "See? I was right all along." Which is annoying, but not the storytellers' responsibility.
The responsibility of the storytellers is to focus on what
they need to do in telling the stories. Establishing a way that you can alter the details of the continuity in a prequel is actually good for storytelling, because it gives the writers more freedom to serve the needs of the stories they're telling rather than the continuity details of other stories.
Nobody becomes a good athlete by dwelling on whether the audience cheers or boos them. They do it by focusing on how to play the game as well as possible. If they do that, the cheers follow, and the boos don't matter.
Changes to Khan and the Eugenics Wars goes beyond just a "nitpick." Both "Space Seed," Wrath of Khan, and Spock's death are major inflection points for the franchise as a whole. When you start changing aspects of those events, then it opens a barrel of worms, and basically argues that everything is in flux.
Nobody suggested changing any of those things, just the background that led to them. Hell, that was the whole point of Sera's rant in "Tomorrow and..." -- that no matter what anyone did to try to undo the Eugenics Wars, some version of the key events still happened, so that Khan still rose to power, was still exiled on the
Botany Bay, and was still found by the
Enterprise and so on. The different pasts all converge on the same present, whether by some kind of timeline inertia (cf. Spock's "Time is a river with currents" theory from "City") or by the corrective actions of temporal agents trying to fix alterations as best they can.
And if everything is changeable then every event within the larger story of Star Trek is transitory and subject to being fiddled with, and arguably has no meaning beyond what current showrunners think about them.
Which is literally just how fiction works, and how it's always worked. Storytellers are always free to alter their continuity at will -- just look at Marvel Comics over the decades. They just usually pretend it was always that way (like Roddenberry did with Klingon ridges in TMP). Explaining it with time travel isn't introducing change where it didn't exist before, it's simply handwaving the change that would've happened anyway because storytellers need the freedom to tweak things from time to time.
But it's quite clear from actually looking at what the writers of SNW are doing, instead of haring off into scaremongering hypotheticals, that their intent is to remain close to the narratively important facts and events of the TOS characters' lives. Not to throw everything out, but to have the freedom to adjust the nonessential and peripheral parts while still staying true to the core narrative and characters of TOS.
Chapel seems more of my own mother's generation. The so called "Silent Generation". More June Cleaver and Harriet Nelson than Anne Marie and Julie Barnes. 
