Reality sure is a lot stranger than fiction
History is full of stuff that would get roasted in a writing workshop.
So you're telling me Napoleon just... escapes exile, walks back to France, and the army sent to stop him just joins him? That's lazy writing. And yet this is exactly what happened.
Or the fact that the same Franz Ferdinand assassination only succeeded because the assassin happened to stop at a sandwich shop on the exact street where the Archduke's driver took a wrong turn. Oh no, terrible writing. Contrived coincidence. And yet....
Winston Churchill was a bricklayer, a painter, a polo player, a Nobel Prize-winning author, and also ran a country during a world war. Damn, this character has no coherent identity and has to be an author's self insert.
Important characters just fucking die for no narrative payoff (hello Genghis Khan), introducing hundreds of subplots that go nowhere, and having the "wrong" side win for centuries at a time. The pacing is terrible--nothing happens for decades and then everything happens in the same five years.
It irritates and amuses me that fiction somehow has to make more sense than reality. Imagine if Sauron fucking died because he slipped and like a cast iron gonked him in the head or something.