There is counterfactual history. It has a very long tradition; Livy in the first century BCE was already asking what would happen if Alexander had marched west instead of east (Livy concludes Rome would have kicked his ass). This isn't quite what you describe in the sense that it doesn't have to make claims about necessary conditions for alternate outcomes (seems to me you get a get a laundry list. If one were to ask what would be necessary for Hannibal to win, you get answers like "it was necessary for Hannibal to have command of an army; it was necessary for Hannibal to gain access to Italy, it was necessary to mint coins, it was necessary to disrupt Rome's alliance system" all of which happened.)

I don't know how respected this approach is. In one sense counterfactuals are implied in any question that asks why something happened the way it did, and there are books like What If that have some very heavy hitters writing them. On the other hand, there are articles like this.

But it's time to be sceptical about this trend. We need, in this year especially, to start to try to understand why the first world war happened, not to wish that it hadn't, or argue about whether it was "right" or "wrong". In the effort to understand, counterfactuals aren't any real use at all.

YMMV I guess.