Because the idea that it is somehow in the same continuity as TOS is pretty laughable to me.
I've got news for you -- the idea that much of TOS is in the same continuity as other parts of TOS is pretty laughable if you dwell too much on the details. And it's even harder to reconcile the specifics of TOS with TWOK, TNG, etc. Continuity in fiction is not supposed to be letter-perfect, but impressionistic. The specifics get reworked all the time, because that's how ongoing creative processes work, but the story
pretends to be a continuous whole, as part of the general suspension of disbelief asked of the audience.
I mean, Marvel Comics pretends that the Spider-Man who's a thirtysomething adult in 2023 is the same Spider-Man who was a 15-year-old in 1961, that his adventures over the past 62 years have all been a single uniform continuity, even though that's impossible given the specifics. Just as it's impossible that the 11 seasons of
M*A*S*H could've been a unified chronicle of a 3-year war, that the character arcs could be continuous even when the date references were retconned from 1953 back to 1951. But it works because fiction is imaginary. It's just telling stories, and naturally stories are adjusted over time to fit their evolving audience and context. But the new stories pretend to be in the same reality as the old stories, and that's perfectly legitimate, because it is all just pretending anyway. You just have to be willing to go along with the conceit. Roddenberry's own view was that
Star Trek was just a dramatized recreation of Kirk's logs, with any inconsistencies between different versions like TOS, TAS, TMP, and TNG just being differences in the dramatization. They're all meant to depict the same underlying reality, they just filter it through different artistic interpretations and different eras' attitudes and production limitations.
Every single time a new incarnation of Trek comes along, going back to the original movies, there are some people who insist its differences from what came before make it impossible to reconcile with previous continuity. But the only real difference is that they've had time to rationalize or gloss over the contradictions in the previous stuff and convince themselves of the fantasy that it actually holds together, whereas they haven't had the time to rationalize the contradictions in the new stuff.
