I'm a couple pages late but the only reason it's 'cringe' is because the book's premise is that it happened to white people instead of Native Americans/Aboriginals/Africans/Asians.
Looking at what people are ACTUALLY listing as the reason for the cringe, no, I think that's unfair.
The other reason
The Years of Rice and Salt gets flak is rather different. Namely, that it takes what took
centuries of deliberate conquistadoring and a dozen or so overlapping simultaneous virgin field epidemics to happen to the Americas, and compresses it all into ten years and a single apocalyptic plague to happen in Europe.
This causes a lot of people to think "wait, is that physically plausible, could that actually happen in a world in which cause and effect and scientific fact and epidemiology seem to work the same way they do in real life?"
And they would think
exactly the same thing, I suspect, if the same author had done the same thing only with the plague killing everyone in the Indian subcontinent while leaving the rest of Eurasia untouched, or killing everyone in China while leaving the rest of Eurasia untouched.
...
Personally I don't have a problem with it, for two reasons:
One is that the story, viewed from a Doylist perspective, isn't a giant conga line of triumphal "see how shitty/wonderful white people are and how much better/worse off the world is without them" rhetoric- it isn't somehow an anti-white mirror image of what a white nationalist would do with a similar premise. The world proceeds
differently than in real life, but with the notable exception that the Native Americans are a hell of a lot better off, a lot of the same evils and problems are clearly recognizable as happening in the altered timeline.
The other is that, in the spirit of John Campbell's guidelines for storytelling*, a novel like
The Years of Rice and Salt gets one "freebie" departure from plausible reality, in order to set up the premise of the story itself. So long as the rest of the setting is handled consistently with internal logic, the main characters aren't running around being idiots in a first-order idiot plot, and the story premise doesn't require
everyone to be an idiot in a
second-order idiot plot... I'm happy. I'm OK with the scientific implausibility of a single virus wiping out 99% of the population within a single delimited blob on a map, while leaving everyone and everything else on Earth virtually untouched.
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*(Campbell's guidelines are not the only guidelines, and not the best guidelines. But they're
good guidelines, I think. Guidelines that do in my opinion have the ability to create some good art that could not be easily created with other rules. Sort of like how you can do things with haiku that you cannot do with any other form of poetry, and achieve an aesthetic result that other poetry cannot reproduce)
