To you.
So why can't you do that here?
It’s 100 years later.
TMP isn't.
How many more years before the crude, gritty aesthetic of Star Wars suffers the same fate as the crude and campy aesthetic of Star Trek?
People complained about exactly that during the Prequel Trilogy.
Perhaps it implied that.
But it only ever implied that, and meanwhile we had other evidence that implied a separate conclusion, in the form of Kor, Kang, and Koloth.
Which is more likely-- that every Klingon Kirk encountered during his five-year mission was a survivor of the augment virus (edit: Including Kahless, who lived and died centuries before Archer!) and no Klingon encountered outside of that time period was; or that the Klingons ruthlessly quarantined or even executed carriers of the augment virus and wiped it out before it got too far, and TOS's visuals aren't literal?
It’s a dizzyingly uneven show with the lowest points of quality in all of Trek.
Dude I've seen TNG season 1 and Enterprise seasons 1-2. I know we both know it can get worse.
In essence, Discovery followed the same arc as the Star Wars sequel trilogy. They swung for the fences on doing something wild and asking difficult questions that the franchise had taken for granted; and even if the answer they arrived at was affirming, there were too many loud nerds that couldn't look past either the flaws that genuinely existed or their own shallow prejudices. Those nerds were loud enough and long enough that the studio walked it back to try to appease them and ended up with something much less interesting, which both alienated defenders of the early direction and could never appease the bad eggs whose criticisms weren't in good faith, leaving something that only a few appreciated.
Personally I'm glad those transphobic fucks aren't allowed anywhere near Star Trek.