Taking a step back, what they've kinda done is taken wattle and daub (but not really) and worked it to industrial standards. And wattle and daub got used in all kinds of ways all over the world.
Obv wattle and daub to structural standards and firecode and such so that your building can meet modern specifications is actually quite a handy thing? But yeah there's an overall myopia to steampunk-leaning researchers to focus on a singular feedstock instead of working to create a spectrum of materials based on local availability.
There really aren't any simple counterfactual historical arguments to be made.
I have a fairly strong feeling that, of the various shuttle variants studied, the majority of them would have at least been vulnerable to a Columbia level disaster.
Plus, the shuttle was very much overweight and there were a lot of nasty compromises there, so I kinda wonder that if they'd gone for broke with the two stage reusable designs that they'd have ended up just getting cancelled because the more reusable things are, the colder the equations. So you can't even really treat the earlier proposals as something that might have worked out better. There are things that no amount of money can make work. Like faster-than-light travel without a fundamental reassessment of physics.
And then a lot of the things in the late-70s-early-80s vision wouldn't have worked out. There was a giant Microwave Radiometer Satellite project that they were cooking on with a giant antenna with a radius of 1150m. Eventually that survey was completed with a much smaller synthetic aperture radio that sat in the shuttle's cargo bay and today there are lots of tiny SAR survey satellites.
There was another giant geosynchronous dish antenna that was supposed to be a single cell phone satellite for all of the continental US. That was overall a bad idea, Iridium did a better version with less lag in lower orbits, and now we've got Starlink and some new competitors coming online and, overall, cell coverage is actually pretty great with conventional towers.
Then again, here's this paper from 1973. See, the shuttle ended up with a reusable second stage the conventional wisdom was that the second stage is always the expensive one so therefore make that reusable and the first stage can basically be a steel pipe with propellant poured into it and everything's fine and the bulk doesn't matter. Thus, only a madman would reuse the first stage. Which is why they were proposing putting parachutes on the Redstone rockets that Mercury used for reuse but never bothered. But, see, they were going to build this two-stage reusable rocket but wanted to preserve the option of launching large bulky cargo... yeah.
The more I think about it, it'd ruin the magic of the story if "Max" got outed. If "Max" goes public and takes credit and maybe talks through how it worked (especially understanding that you could not pull off the same trick today) that would be cool but ... even ignoring any sort of potential harm it just ruins the spirit of the thing.
Not really, although that was clearly a popular impression created by the 1980s Right Stuff movie.
Both the US and USSR had the A4/V-2 rocket and both the US Redstone and USSR R-11/SS-1 "Scud" were grown-up and bug-fixed versions thereof.
The US kept the Operation Paperclip folks going throughout the program, leading to Von Braun's team designing the Saturn V rocket, even though the Redstone Arsenal / Marshall Space Flight Center folks didn't design some of the other rockets.
The USSR kept their Germans under a tight leash and every time they designed a rocket, they'd have the Soviet team design the same thing, they'd compare, and then after a few years, they sent back their Germans to live in obscurity because the Soviet team had gotten good enough.
Thus big rockets ended up being a German ex-Nazi party member, Von Braun and his Saturn V vs a Ukranian, Korolev and his N-1.
Thus, an astonishing number of rockets are based off of the A-4 design, many of them with the Scud as the middle step. And neither America nor Russia gets to really take credit for their chief designer, where obviously both men were mostly acting to provide structure to the giant armies of engineers who did the actual work (but doing it well, the USSR program really screwed things up after Korolev passed away). But there was a bunch of really neat bits of rocket science that the USSR did in the 70s-80s that was well above where the US was specifically because while Korolev was Von Braun's generation, most of the newly taught Soviet scientists were not. Where, again, the real problem was that Korolev didn't have any good successor leaders and the USSR was in a state of stagflation.
And you can say many things about the USSR space program, but they were significantly less "nazi" than the US program.