The fact that this miniseries exists and people believe it to be a perhaps embellished, but ultimately accurate depiction of anything that happened in real life is a testament to everything wrong with TV series and the people who consume them. The series gets so many things so absolutely wrong it's a mystery why the writers chose to use the names of actually existing people and places rather than setting the story in an entirely fictional universe.

Many of these problems have been pointed out in far more detail in think pieces, but just to quickly summarize the most egregious ones:

1) The science depicted is completely wrong, from the magnitude of the disaster to the real effects of radiation on humans. One is only left to wonder how come if the people on the "bridge of death" several kilometers away supposedly died from the effects of radiation, all of the supervisors (who were in the nuclear plant at the time of the accident) survived for decades 2) Many of the events depicted are either complete fabrications, or have been blown out of proportion 3) Of the remaining few that actually did happen, their order is often wrong 4) The Soviet State of the late 80s, while repressive, didn't go around murdering or threatening to murder its own citizens 5) For all the expository scienc-ey talk about rector cores, DNA damage, etc. the real dangers of radiation and nuclear fallout are never properly explained, leaving the viewer wondering what the stakes are and how and why decisions are being taken

The most plausible explanation of why the writers chose to twist the facts to such absurd extremes is that if they had done otherwise there wouldn't be a story worth telling, in which case one is left to wonder why would they choose to adapt it in the first place.