Just because fascism was depicted in a video game doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.

If there’s anything to fault games like HoI4 for, it would be that it doesn’t really depict how bad fascism is, it’s basically just choosing which team you’re on and which buffs you’ll get. I think the devs just expected people to know how bad it is from understanding history, but maybe people really do think of it like choosing a team.