I don't think it's a stretch to say that entertainment has been dumbed down to appeal to base ideals. It's never been a secret that Star Trek has had an underpinning of traditionally left wing ideas (at least while Roddenberry was alive), but it was never dumb or childish (or at least rarely). In part the blame lies in the hypercritical stance people have taken over the years. If you take risks, there are going to be times when you get it wrong. And like any popular media, the fandom tears into every misstep it can.
Discovery, the bit that I've seen, is the opposite of risk-taking. A very standard show, with very standard, modern visuals and camera work, very standard writing, and very safe opinions, such as they are. Its ideas don't go particularly deep. There's a reason people go on and on about representation, and that's because there isn't anything else. It never uses the setting to make a point, however simplistic. There's no episode where an Orion just paints itself pink or brown and pretends to be human so they don't have to deal with the racial/political implications that come with being from a planet-wide criminal syndicate or some other basal plot idea.
The Klingon Prison Ship episode for example; Good job, you accurately recreated a hellish prison camp as the backdrop to your character drama, how 'invaluably' this was used (sarcasm).
Star Trek has always been about a large cast of characters and not just 1 main character, and its diversity and politics were always plot relevant and not forced, not "muh short-haired black woman who don't need no man" stereotype. Star Trek was the celebration of being yourself often enough, and tried to go against stereotypes, while Discovery's main character is essentially a woman trying to be a man while pointing out they're a woman, something easily visible in her name being MICHAEL. As a person who enjoys diverse and interesting characters especially women, the past decade of media has essentially made female characters into pathetic partisan stand-ins. Like George Carlin said, whats the point of feminism if your only idea of a strong woman is for her to act and essentially BE a man? If men suck so much (as is implied) why is imitating them a good thing? Is feminism so devoid of anything that it has to stoop to copying those it opposes?
All that STD is missing is what we're getting from The Orville. NuTrak is just safe characters going through action plots. They even use modern language, which I absolutely hate. And then pat themselves on the back for having characters say "fuck". Aren't we progressive? FFS Deep Space 9 had Cirroc Lofton full on say "niggers". Except it's in an episode where it actually has a point, so no-one remembers it as special. As someone said, it's like Game of Thrones in space; war, bloody pointless brutality and political complications born out of bickering. In spite of having 1 main character there is far too large a cast in the show, ironic really.
Its essentially the Clone Wars TV series but without real grounding in the films/prior media and without any relateable characters or actual new ideas or realistic intricacy.
The one positive is that we never actually lost anything. The old stuff is still there, it's still just as good, and there are even people rediscovering it through the new content. Though I won't lie, it does fucking annoy me how this shit seeps into the community. For instance, now I have to bullshit-filter stuff I read on Memory Alpha because "muh Discovery is Canun!". Like, fuck off.
Honestly with all the diversity bullshit, you'd wonder, why not just go straight for a bisexual Caitian like M'ress being a main character of a show? You'd get:
A) a sexual minority (bisexual)
B) a female lead (feminism)
C) a minority race (feline)
D) you get furries on board (and /x/ lyran fags)
E) Trekkies would like it since its a canon alien not featured since the old days.
All that would be awesome... and that's why it won't happen.
The reason we won't see sexy space cats is the same reason they don't get anything else right. Sexy space cats aren't safe. They'd have to go through a design phase, of course. Then they'd have to decide how they're going to do it, make-up or CGI. They're going to want CGI, because practical effects make road-of-the-least-resistance execs puke. Then they're going to see how expensive it is and remember they're greedy, soulless fucks without vision, so they don't really need to do anything risky or avant garde. So they'll just slap a CGI tail on there like in the Into Dorkness scene and call it good. I mean, while we're playing up the promiscuous nature of Captain Kirk to almost comical levels we don't want to actually have him have sex with anything that doesn't look human in this science fiction franchise about exploration and understanding, now do we? That'd scare away Joe Average who pretends to be disgusted by anything but the thinnest of models so his friends don't call him a limp dick faggot. It's ironic that back in the day of "le boomer meme" people were a lot more internally accepting of such shit while today, they're more openly liberal when virtue signalling but in practice can't stop hiding behind their pretentious pandering.
They like CGI because it's easily changed in post without reshoots. You can see this with a lot of action movies. Gone are 80's squibs (even in many 80s tribute films) and in are CGI puffs of red, because they can easily leave those out and make the entire thing PG-13. With squibs you have to rig them for every single take, and for a big action sequence that can be really time consuming to redo. With CG blood you can do a lot of takes more easily then choose the one you want and add the effects to it later. However while that is true it means that they are took lackadaisical. The limiting factor of having to reset the squibs every time forced actors to do their cuts with more effort (which shows seeing the lack of proper facial reaction and general acting in general in many of today's films.
They only care about diversity as a marketing ploy. It's easy to cast non-white actors and then use them as a shield against criticism or as an accomplishment on their own. Discovery is less diverse than TOS, yet it wants all the fucking credit. It even tried to sell 'Michael' as the FIRST black star trek character, amended it to first black lead and finally first black female lead (also tripping over first female lead), ignoring TOS, VOY and DS9 in 1 fell swoop, despite STD supposedly being canon to TOS.
Frankly Discovery isn't as bad as other diversity ploys at least, "le cis-white-male" meme is still present but compared to Batwoman, Star Wars: Last Jedi and other inane trash its pretty low-key - not that being compared to trash makes it better. People were going to either support it as shallow newfags, support it for its radlib policies, or hate it for both those reasons. The executives apparently didn't realize this until the 2nd season which is why Picard was made, to hook fans back in with conspirational intrigue and a beloved nostalgic set of characters. It's mediocre pandering, like Force Awakens was to Star Wars, but people appreciate even that after the trashfire of the past years.
TL;DR: STD has little 'Discovery' in it being more like Game of Thrones than Star Trek, is bland, 'safe' virtue signalling aimed at SJWs and newfags because catgirls despite being more fun and new (in comparison, are not mainstream enough apparently. Picard is just a reaction to the failure of STD, and while enjoyable is mediocre in a technical sense.