That's a false dichotomy. If you watch The Expanse, you'll see a show that features both realistic space physics (aside from an imaginary high-acceleration rocket system) and plenty of action. And there are tons of military SF novels out there that are loaded with action built around realistic space physics. Just because most movie and TV producers are too lazy and unimaginative to try it doesn't mean their way is intrinsically better.
If anything, what's boring to me is seeing the same old space-battle cliches over and over. Acknowledging real physics can let you make a combat scene interesting in ways that would never occur to someone who was just copying a naval battle or a WWII dogfight. Like the harrowing scene in an Expanse episode where a character neglected to lock down a rack of tools before a space battle and the occupants of the ship were mortally endangered by the loose tools being flung around the cabin as the ship applied changing thrust at multiple gravities. That was a lot more exciting than just tilting the camera and having the actors fall out of their chairs.
I had a thought the other day that Star Trek missed an interesting opportunity. What if someone very early on had applied some real thought to inventing a novel system of combat in warp drive? Trek usually just ignores the difference between maneuvering at warp and maneuvering at sublight, even though it makes no sense to treat them the same way. A ship at warp is in a pocket of spacetime moving FTL relative to the surrounding space. If one ship at warp fired a phaser beam at another ship at warp, it should have no effect, since the phaser beam would have to travel slower than light through the normal space between the two ships' warp bubbles. So taking that limitation into account would've required creating an imaginative set of battle tactics for fighting at warp, something more complex and challenging and novel than just firing a broadside from the port cannons. And there are all sorts of other ways that an imaginative tech consultant could've defined rules for warp combat that would make it distinctive, like maybe limitations on the ability to detect a ship at warp so that it could be used for stealth attacks. Or maybe being in warp creates a blind spot that an enemy can exploit.
Of course, given all the different creators that have worked on Trek over the decades, with differing levels of knowledge or concern for plausible science, you wouldn't have wanted such a warp combat system to be too complicated. But if someone early in the game had concocted a few firm rules and protocols -- you can do this, you can't do that, you follow this procedure to get that result -- then it could've been standardized as easily as, say, transporter rules like "You have to lock onto someone with sensors to transport them" or "You need to drop shields first." And it could've let them create a combat system that was unique to Star Trek and different from anything else out there. That's certainly not boring. Everyone doing space battles the same way is what's boring.
