And extra-terrestrial intelligences haven't made their presence known - or had it discovered by us by our own devices - either. If they do, they won't match against Star Trek's established histories for any of them. Including whatever stars their homeworlds orbit. Alternative history, all the way from the start of intelligent life off-Earth to now, and into their version of the future. I'm okay with this.
All fiction is "alternate history." Trek is no more or less so than Blue Bloods. All the fussing about timelines is an example of fannish obsessive excess. Not one in every five thousand viewers sits down to watch an episode of Trek with any awareness or interest in the "alternate history" premise.
Uh,.. isn't that what this forum is for? I'm not too wild about the change. Especially since Pike puts the Eugenics War and WW3 in line with a "Second Civil War" in the US that would need to start in a few years. I hope that's not gonna happen, and I also hope that by the 2050s all of us and Star Trek are still around and there hasn't been an atomic war. Would the show then have to come up with yet another explanation? Better to accept that the whole of Star Trek takes place in an alternate timeline that branched off from ours somewhere between the 1960s and 1990s.