Also, throughout all of “Discovery,” the series never once addressed the massive sea change that teleportation technology would have on an organization like the Federation. If ships now had the ability to instantaneously appear anywhere in the universe, wouldn’t that fundamentally alter everything about the way society operates? It seems that the showrunners merely wanted to cut down on “down time,” and eliminated any period wherein characters traveled from point A to point B.
They essentially eliminated trekking from “Star Trek.” Gone, then, was any sense of cosmic scale. Again, the show narrowed in too closely on its characters.
At the end of the second season, the showrunners invented a wise conceit that explained away why the U.S.S. Discovery, its crew, or its teleportation, was never mentioned in the previous shows. It seems a malevolent machine intelligence infected the ship, and if anyone broadcast any information about said intelligence, it could spread and take over the galaxy. The Discovery flew through a time portal and wound up nearly a millennium in the future. Back in the present, Starfleet issued orders to strike the Discovery from all historical records. The canon is now clean again.
In the future, the Federation was wounded after a galaxy-wide cataclysm destroyed almost all the starships. But even as the Discovery met with a future Starfleet, received upgrades, and looked a little more closely at its own tech and Starfleet’s place in a wounded galaxy, it still never spent enough time on the Discovery itself.
One might think the show would begin devoting itself to 1,000-year-old officers climatizing themselves to new rules and tech, but it was still too action-forward and badly written. Even with a new ship, “Discovery” did not settle in.