This has some impact on predictive power too. One reason people tried to build the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is that - more or less, you actually could imagine building that. My friend's daughter talks to the AI, and is learning to read stuff on a glowing screen that knows her name. She doesn't have an abusive step-father, and so fortunately her glowing screen won't need to teach her martial arts for people who are smaller and less powerful than their opponent, and about the importance of running away when there's no way to win. And hopefully her mother will remain a loving physical presence in her life. But the general thrust of the idea in the Primer makes sense, even if we aren't close to "really" building the Primer, ideas from Gibson don't make so much sense.

Science Fiction isn't necessarily about "a version of what we have" but it is about the What If? question and fantasy stories don't address that. Unexpected consequences are the story seed in good SF. Asimov in the 1950s notes that a good SF story predicts not the automobile but the traffic jam. That's where I think Stephenson is good and Gibson has nothing to tell me.

Star Wars says Space Wizards fighting laser sword battles may not vanquish Evil and I'm like OK, cool, but so what? Diamond Age (in some sense a sequel to Snow Crash) has a bunch of interesting things to say about society, about what parenthood means, about Cultural Imperialism, and about what we/how we teach children.

And as to the idea that it became true, well, here in the real world it is Russia that invaded Ukraine and not an invasion by Gazprom or whoever. The sovereign entities are still fundamentally concrete in a way that a corporation is not.

The Fists in Diamond Age may in some sense be tools of the Mandarins, but certainly the Mouse Army don't work for anybody except Princess Nell, their loyalty to her has been blended into all their learning from infancy, almost without anybody consciously intending this (Hackworth is ultimately responsible, but if/why Hackworth chooses Nell rather than his own daughter is unclear, we don't see enough of the other copies of the Primer to discern whether the other two girls could have led the Mouse Army, the novel is about Nell).

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/10/23/traffic/

Pohl in the late 1960s acknowledges that he isn't the first to have this idea, but does actually use "traffic jam": “Somebody once said that a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam”

I rather like Heinlein who a little earlier (1966) suggests SF would have predicted something more interesting, instead of car -> traffic jam, Heinlein says good SF would have predicted car -> teenage fumblings in borrowed car.