Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space universe explores this, often times with sub-light travelers arriving at what they thought would be one of the largest cities in known space only to find it devastated by a plague. More relevantly, the book Chasm City, set in this universe, explores a set of generation ships competing to arrive first at an uninhabited planet.
In Homesick by Lyn Venables the first interstellar crew arrive home and find that people have been lapping them for 30 years.
That’s 1952. Probably it was already a trope by then...
In addition to the already-mentioned Chasm City... Into the Sea of Stars by William R. Forstchen comes to mind. Generational ships take off from a dying Earth. The Earth recovers and faster-than-light technology is eventually developed. The FTL ships are tasked with tracking down the generational ships.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora comes to mind, as it explores similar ideas to the study. The featured generational starship suffers from a deteriorating biome due to inbreeding and loss of nutrients, and the book also explores the effects of disasters and politics on the viability of such a journey,
I think Samuel R. Delany's "I was the first to find you" dealt with that, but it had the twist that the newer explorers knew about the previous ship that was still on the way and went looking for them.
... or not. It's been at least 15 years since I read it.
I think Allen Steele's Coyote series features this, but I can't seem to find any reference to it. (And I no longer have the books).