It is enough for me that the writers and showrunners have said, in so many words, that DSC and SNW are explicitly in the Prime continuity. It is also enough for me that the Abramsverse movies are just as explicitly in an alternate timeline, and even provide backstory for that alternate timeline. I would say that @Christopher (who has wisely avoided saying anything in the "SNW Alternate Universe" thread at all) said it best when he said (in a thread about SNW in the TrekLit section):
One of my three favorite musicals is Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along (the other two being Edwards & Stone's 1776 and Schwartz & Hirson's Pippin). I've seen Merrily with cast ethnicities all over the place. I've seen productions that treat the entire show as taking place inside Frank's head, and I've seen productions that treat the whole reverse chronology as simply having the audience magically enabled to backtrack through every wrong decision that doomed the friendship of Frank, Charley, and Mary. While I prefer the latter to the former, they're both valid interpretations. With Pippin, since the Leading Player (Pippin's nemisis, for those who haven't seen it) has no defined ethnicity or gender, I've seen it with a white man in the role (my high school's production, circa 1980), a white woman (a community theatre production in Sacramento), and a black man (Ben Vereen, in the Broadway production, of which I have a licensed proshot videocassette). I quite literally have no preference between the three, and I like the way this diversity brings different interpretations to the character.
And in terms of continuity, I would say that SNW 3x04, "A Space Adventure Hour," the "Rec Room" in TAS 2x03, "The Practical Joker," Diane Duane's rec dec scenes in her novels, and the fully realized holodecks and holosuites of TNG, DS9, VOY, and LD, form a perfectly reasonable technology development arc.
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