I think Prelude and the last few seasons of Trek both suffer from a weird sort of tunnel vision and lack of interest in their own stories that I've gotten tired of.
So, in Prelude, the big thing is that Garth is supposed to be this tactical genius. In fact, quite a lot of the doc is talking about tactics and strategy and maneuvers, but it never actually explains what any of them are. The Klingons invaded using "the strategy of least respect," but what does that entail? Garth attacked the Klingons boldly, "like a Klingon maneuver," but how did that differ from what had been done before? The lack of overt explanation would be more forgivable in a straight narrative rather than a documentary, but even if it had been presented as a conventional movie, it was obvious that no one behind the scene knew the answers to those questions, either. They didn't show any kind of particular logic or through-line in the action, as far as I know, most of the space combat scenes were created in a vacuum (pardon the expression) and assembled in editing, and weren't made to coincide with any particular narrative purpose. There are other movies and shows I can point to where the logic of the action is secondary to the emotional reality and doesn't get walked through for the audience, but it's still clearly there, and you can deduce the tech-plot if you look carefully ("The Expanse" does this a lot, as did the new BSG), or even ones when the emotional reality is important so the action is straightforward, but doesn't get dressed up and have people tell you its so complicated and intricate when it isn't (which is what the action sequences in "Babylon 5" were more like, simple but direct).
And DSC does the same thing. I only have first-hand knowledge up to season 2 (when I decided I would get off the train until I saw reviews that satisfied me that the shows were off this bullshit), but there are a bunch of times where the show just asserts stuff without doing any work for it. There's Tilly's "Power of math!" moment, where they had to catch a weird asteroid, but they can't, but then there's a montage and a little machine unfolds into a big machine, and they can, now. What math? There was no problem-solving, no clever moment, just a weird cathartic beat celebrating a non-victory. But the one that bothered me the most was when they developed a plan to capture the Red Angel based on the fact that it kept showing up when Michael's life was in danger, and it worked, and then a few episodes later, we find out the Angel hadn't actually been showing up when Michael's life was in danger, it was a different Red Angel, and the one time the first Angel had shown up to save Michael, she appeared somewhere else, which would've been useless for their trap. No one seems to realize that they tried to murder Burnham on a theory that was completely, utterly wrong!
It's like reading an outline of a story riddled with "TK TK TK." Or, more on-topic, if the '90s Trek scripts where the writers just left space for the sci-fi problems in the script with "Wait, this is just like the personal problem I'm dealing with in the b-plot! We can [tech] the [tech], which is analogous to how I can address my strained relationship with my parents, and that should [tech] and deflect the asteroid!" they decided the solution to "too much technobabble" was just to cut all those segments out entirely, so we're left with lots of big feelings and big plots that don't integrate, but still amplify each other's intensity in ways that don't make sense and aren't really resolved except in the most superficial ways.
anyways.