hindsight bias

Your memory rewrites past events to make them predictable.

Once you know the outcome of an event, you tend to overestimate the likelihood that you would have predicted that specific outcome beforehand.

Change 'perceive it as having been inevitable all along' to 'perceive it as having been more predictable than it actually was'.

You cannot easily imagine what it was like to not know the outcome.

Where this comes from

Study: Baruch Fischhoff, 1975, Journal of Experimental Psychology
What the check found: The seminal 1975 Fischhoff paper established 'hindsight bias' as an increase in perceived likelihood, not necessarily absolute inevitability.
Confidence: Solid, with limits

One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.