Well, this is fiction so there's a fair handful of deus ex machina here; if it needs to happen for the story, a particularly bad world needs only to be plausible to come about. Moreover, there's a poorly-defined mechanism which makes the chosen world be more like what they expect it to be than would be really justified by its description. Sorry I'm doing a poor job of describing the exact setup, since it's a little convoluted. It's also not a 100% known mechanism for the character involved either.