The vast majority of high-concept science fiction has very little to do with science, and much more to do with an audience that (a) would like for magic to exist and (b) wants to be taken seriously as members of a modern society who future improves over its past.
This insecurity is most profound in people who insist that they like science fiction but dislike "fantasy."
This ties into my least favorite kind of "hard sci fi" writing:
Instead of grabbing a science or technology concept and extrapolating from there to explore how the world would adapt to it, what the consequences of the thing would be, etc... the author just really wants FTL travel so they do cartwheels to try to justify in the text how it can realistically happen, which ends up being a shit ton of info dumping that adds nothing.
Hard sci fi is at its best when the author lets their research guide them, when the limitations of technology result in interesting consequences. Unfortunately a lot of writers only want "hard" scifi that validates them as "serious" writers, but have no interest in what the genre does well. So they work backwards from their handwavy technobabble to shoehorn their story into a "hard" setting, which ends up being "soft scifi, but worse"
