I don't have that same sense of betrayal that some of my friends do towards the modern incarnations.
The Original Series is just 'Three Himbos In Space', with twilight-zone levels of consistency and continuity. On good days, it's a western. A stranger from out of town brings their own sense of justice to resolve tragedy. On the bad days, it's accidentally hilarious.
The next generation tried to rekindle the magic but only really succeeded when they realised the fun part was "The weekly D&D game in the holodeck". The thing is, it still had that western vibe, exploring a frontier thing going on, but instead of the lone gun slinger, it was more a cross between mall cops and the league of nations.
TNG is kinda funny because the big old enemy was basically "what if we took the nyt's fears of communism where society trumps the individual", all the while never looking in the mirror at this gigantic militaristic organization with matching jumpsuits.
Let's not even talk about Voyager, where the bite sized moral contradicted itself from one episode to the next. One minute Janeway's yelling about rejecting traditions, breaking off from family and culture, and the next she's yelling at the very same person to follow orders, because this is a military.
Unlike TNG, they never really found their vibe. Drowning in nostalgia for hard military types in the unknown, they made do with monster of the week episodes. Which gave us such classics as "We went too fast at warp speed and now we're lizards".
Then you've got DS9, every queer's favourite. For perhaps the only time, Star Trek asked "are the the baddies?", asking if the neofeudalism of "service guarantees citizenship" was all it was cut out to be. DS9 had plenty of flaws, most of all the ending, but even their bad guys were fleshed out.
In other words: Apart from DS9, most of Star Trek has lived up to Sturgeon's Law, but that doesn't mean it's all bad.
To one friend, Star Trek is Hopeful. A unified planet, a desire to explore and understand the world. He'll readily admit that his reading isn't quite that nuanced, and likely a result of watching it as a young child, but he still has a point. Other Sci-Fi of the era is all doom and gloom, post apocalyptic, or the jazz standards of cyberpunk: orientalism, touch screen interfaces, and depressed sex worker robots.
Which brings me to the modern series. I think they've lost that hope for the future.
You've got Discovery, where the crew is on a mission to seek out new life and new showrunners each season. Jumping back and forward in time to carefully work it's way around the decades of canon built up, and long elaborate fights against that classic sci-fi nemesis: The Network Executive.
Still, people like it, because there's a larger selection of hot characters. Some of them even have blue hair, and others have pronouns. It isn't just three himbos any more, and that's a good thing.
I guess there's also "Strange New Worlds" but it still feels like a poor imitation of what's come before, another victim of pleasing the Network and design by metrics. It isn't that bad, but at the same time, it just isn't that good, either.
Then you've got Picard, a series which demonstrates that there was more to the old Star Trek than a host of familiar characters and big explosions in space. It's a show that's a victim of it's own fandom, desperate to reference every cool thing that happened in-universe, and utterly loath to even consider basing things on actual people, or actual stories.
Miyazaki wasn't wrong about Otaku ruining the industry.
If the new series have done one thing well, they've made me realise how much better the original series were. Not because of their characters, or story lines, but because they tried something new, fought the network executives, and sometimes they even got away with it, too.
It just feels quite damning that each new incarnation of "boldly going where no-one has gone before" has become "Now That's What I Call Star Trek: 2023", absolutely terrified of doing anything new.
