You would think a group of showrunners making a sequel to "Assignment: Earth," a TOS episode which postulated multiple nations launching orbital nuclear platforms in 1968, would be more comfortable with the idea that this franchise's version of the present day has always been different from our own timeline.
Perhaps. But note that the 1968 we saw in that episode, aside from the unseen space platforms, looked indistinguishable from the present-day reality of the viewers of the time. It was all about Kirk and Co. visiting "our" time, not just some strange alternative timeline where the Nazis won or whatever. There were phonebooths, taxis, typewriters, hippy chicks, etc.
Not that I disagree, but this is essentially saying, "Aside from the things that were different, everything was the same!" Well...yeah.
And, honestly, it was pretty standard for genre shows in the sixties or seventies to throw in one or two pieces of advanced sci-fi tech without postulating any radical changes to history, just so you could have the occasional evil computer, laser death-ray, killer robot, and so on. But the conceit was always that this was set in "our" present-day, where secret agents and superheroes occasionally ran into tech that edged into sci-fi territory.
All this is basically a variation on the classic "Why would a superhero universe share our popular culture?" complaint/nitpick/observation. The "real" answer is that it wouldn't, and that goes for any fictional world where significant historical events differ from ours. (It doesn't make much sense on
Doctor Who, either, for instance.)
I also understand the impulse to make "the present" seem like our sense of what that means. When
Independence Day: Resurgence came out, it depicted a 2016 with super-tech and moonbases, which make perfect sense for a world where an alien invasion happened twenty years ago but aren't recognisable to the audience--more plausible, but far less relatable.
Fortunately, the creators of fiction get to craft their world(s) and thus choose which relatable elements remain and which don't, and many things would realistically be around in any event. (After all, would a world in which the Eugenics Wars happened really not have taxis?) The makers of
Picard are already depicting a world with Sanctuary Districts and crewed missions to Europa and drones with sunlight-blocking force fields, all of which are two years away from not happening.
I'll think about all of this some more the next time I visit the Cetacean Institute in Sausalito.
