The Treaty of Versailles made it inevitable that there would be another war. There was no world where Germany could actually stay a nation and also abide by the treaty. Demanding payments that would be ruinous for the pre-war nation and stripping that nation of much of it's capacity to pay alone ensured that Germany would either die or revolt.
The appeasement politics of the 1930's did what the nations engaging in them needed them to, they delayed the war until at least SOME of the Allied Powers were in a position to actually fight.
You've been reading revisionist histories, apparently.
The reparations made continuing political tension inevitable. It was not at all necessary for those tensions to escalate to war.
At the start of the 1930's, it was not Germany that held the whip hand militarily, it was the allied powers. Germany was still near-completely disarmed, as per the treaty. It took
years of the Germans continuously and egregiously breaking the treaty before they were well enough armed that the allies couldn't have rolled over them in a couple of weeks.
It was the lack of will to fight.
The Allied leaders were so terrified of a repeat of the Great War, that their spinelessness ensured that it would not simply be repeated, but be
much worse than the first time around. If they'd acted decisively when the rump German army marched into the demilitarized zone, that would have been the end of it, right there.
IIRC, historical documents have been recovered proving that if the Allies had acted then, the German military and civilian leadership were ready to seize Hitler and hand him over as a scapegoat in exchange for renewing the peace. It was the allies
continuous favor to not just enforce the treaty, but outright endorse Hitler violating it, that was key in destroying any chance of him being thrown out of office in the 1930's.