That's about the planets, not the people visiting them.
The point is about the "New," not the "Worlds." I'm tired of franchise fiction just paging through its own old photo albums. A franchise that relies entirely on rehashing its own past is stagnant. TNG, DS9, and VGR didn't rely on constant references to TOS -- on the contrary, they only very rarely referenced it at all, and mostly created new parts of the universe. By so doing, they expanded and enriched the universe enormously. These days, we do get that in
Discovery and to an extent in
Prodigy, but so much else of today's Trek is exhaustingly obsessed with yesterday's Trek.
I see the same pattern in Japanese superhero shows. In the '90s and '00s,
Ultraman and
Kamen Rider were all about innovating, creating new series in new universes without dependence on the continuity of the original shows from the '60s, '70s, and early '80s. Yet in recent years, both franchises and
Super Sentai have become dependent on references to the past. The current series in all three franchises have the heroes or their enemies derive their powers from the heroes of previous series, often in ways that have no evident connection to the current storyline. And the
Ultraman series of the past decade have mostly recycled old monsters rather than creating new ones.
I think this is what happens when franchises get taken over by their own fans. They turn into fanfiction for their own past, instead of just telling new stories.
