I mean it's sort of that, but when you're talking about this scale of change... there aren't many decisions individual hunter-gatherers could have made 5,000 years ago that would have made agriculture not suck in their area, or individual decisions that a modern day hunter-gatherer could make today that will move anything tomorrow.

All historical figures we talk about had some connection to real power - either they directly wielded it or they had some influence over it. Individual decisions could change the course of history, flip power dynamics, etc. but only to a certain degree. The environment can be a strong limiter on human choices. If you can't eat or can't drink, you die.

I think that controversy must be centered around specific applications of environmental determinism, where it's deemed to be over applied. Nobody would argue that like, getting hit by a tsunami doesn't matter and it's really down to the individual choices of the people getting hit by a tsunami.

There's other environmental factors like not having the metals readily available that you can forge to mine other metals, etc. that can hold back an area from advancing.

I could definitely see where people could get obsessed with this deterministic line of thinking and totally mis-analyze all kinds of situations.