Terminator 2 Alternate Ending Exists, And It's Way Too Corny
Or, actually, there is an extended ending to Terminator 2, which became an alternate ending once the unfortunate decision to film more sequels was made.
But back then you can hardly call it "alternate", as everyone who watched Terminator 2: Judgment Day when it first came out can agree that the whole idea of the movie's main plot was preventing the rise of Skynet and the titular nuclear apocalypse from ever occurring.
Yes, that caused a very blatant time paradox instead of a closed time loop of the original Terminator, which is also paradoxical, but in a way which is much easier to rationalize and handwave.
But it is not like imaginary things like time travel are governed by hard laws. A variation of the same extended ending, with old Sarah Connor living through the day on which Skynet started the nuclear war in the original timeline, was also included into the epilogue of Terminator 2's original novelization, so there is no doubt that said extended ending fully reflected the director's intent.
Maybe it was removed from the movie's theatrical cut, because makeup that was supposed to make Linda Hamilton (Sarah Connor) look older ended up rather poor. Or maybe the scene as a whole ended up just too corny.
And so Cameron did not want the last lines of the movie to be, "I face it, for the first time, with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too."
But corny or not, Cameron probably still should have left the extended ending in the movie, to cut off any possible sequel hooks right away. Alas, he didn't.
While that probably would not have prevented someone from eventually making more bad sequels anyway, as studios nowadays are even more persistent than Skynet, maybe it would have spared us from Terminator: Dark Fate.
In any case, a good number of old fans by now prefer to believe that the Terminator 2 extended ending/the novelization ending is the true conclusion to the franchise, and if they accept any subsequent works, then only these which do not overtly undo it, like the Terminator: Resistance video game.