This show already has more than half the TOS crew and they are recycling their stories. Yawn.
They're not "recycling" their stories. They're fleshing them out by providing new information and backstory that's never been revealed onscreen before.
Heck, Uhura had
no backstory to speak of prior to SNW and we knew next to nothing about Scotty's past as well, aside from him being a "an old Aberdeen pub crawler."
Likewise for Spock's history with T'Pring, which consisted of only a few lines of dialogue in "Amok Time," and pretty much everything about Chapel's past, aside from a missing fiance in one episode, which was then never mentioned again.
This is all fresh material, and arguably long overdue.
Heck, Uhura didn't even get a first name --
onscreen -- until the 2009 reboot, so I'm not going to begrudge her a moment in the sun now. And it's not as though we've already seen Nichelle Nichols (or Zoe Saldana) cope with her family's death, struggle to find her place aboard the Enterprise, find and lose an Andorian mentor, and even get her own Uhura-centric episodes, which she
never got back on TOS.
In short, this is new territory, not just a rehash of what we saw back in the sixties.