It really is. There is some non-canon stuff about Spock being a complicated "merger", but now Trek just slaps them together with no regard to science.
It's beyond "odd," it's one of the many ridiculously unscientific conceits that Trek has embraced from its beginning. And yeah, the fact that it's nonsensical was noted and discussed by science fiction fans way back when it first premiered.
That fig leaf the writers tried to put on it in "The Chase" just exacerbated how preposterous it is.
This kind of space opera is, very simply, many decades out of date no matter what's done with it. Part of the context of Harlan Ellison's frequent disdain for the show that isn't immediately evident fifty years later is that these kind of galactic-empire-with-navies yarns had ceased to be taken seriously within the genre back in the 1950s and there was a very conscious movement pushing away from such pulp magazine tropes among ambitious sf writers in the mid-to-late 60s. It doesn't matter whether one considers those folks to have been right or to have been solemnly pretentious twits, the kind of stuff Trek lifted from earlier media productions and stories to build its universe was dated even then.
Space opera is still published, of course. The few examples that tend to win awards and get a lot of attention now are at least self-aware enough to deconstruct some of the cliches that shows like STD and
The Orville take for granted that the audience will accept.
I'm old and I have a soft spot for that stuff myself, such as
The Tour of The Merrimack series which is a pretty unapologetic throw-back to the 40s and 50s stuff; the earliest books seem to have Trek as one inspiration. I even managed to consume most of the first five
Honor Harrington books - talk about a Mary Sue!
