William Shockley, Fairchild, Intel, Texas Instruments, et al, simply exploited the fundamental characteristics of matter & energy designed into the universe from the beginning by God Himself. ICs are designed as they are b/c at the most fundamental level it's the way they have to work. So there's no real way around that basic limitation of physics.
The architectures of the designs themselves could be different however, even radically so. For example, if the microprocessor world had gone down the RISC/GPU path predominantly, we would never have run into the end of Moore's Law. We would have a steady exponential growth in compute power for the foreseeable future. This is why GPUs have taken over in ML/AI tbh.
Most importantly is the political aspect. When legal systems are explicitly set up to line the pockets of the lawmakers themselves and actively encourage developers of technology to crush competition, then it will inevitably turn out in the end into the pozzed shitshow we have in front of us now. In short; all technology, both hardware and software, must be open, and contain no hidden secrets.
This would be the most important--and most difficult to imagine--change in history which would have led to a much more powerful computing world for today.