Back here in the real world we have more light than we know what to do with. We have things that seem to light up the world accidentally, like the screen of our phones, better than flashlights can do the job in the future.
There's some other tropes where super-futuristic, sci-fi technology is noticeably worse than our real-world technology (weaponry in particular, most "ray guns" are noticeably inferior to real-world guns in almost every way except perhaps ammo capacity), but none I can think of where the every day experience of everybody now is so readily at-hand to know better.
A tangent: it dawned on me only a few years ago just how little power LED lights use compared to most other things we do with energy. I never had a good intuition for this, so I was surprised when I noticed that keeping my smartphone's flashlight active at full power doesn't noticeably drain its battery - in stark contrast to even keeping the screen on (and thus the phone's CPU awake).
I suspect your iPhones must be staying awake for the duration of using the flashlight, for some reason.
Bulky power sources at this point in the timeline are entirely consistent with the book. What's wildly inconsistent is that Cleon has a personal force field that's supposed to be invented a hundred years later, on Terminus, isolated from the Empire.
I was thinking about this watching Foundation. In thousands of years will humans really be _shooting projectiles_ at each other to disrupt vital organs? Why wouldn't it be some kind of device that interacts on a deeper level, I'm thinking like setting off a mini-nuclear-chain-reaction when coming into contact with a single cell that just causes their body to instantly vaporize.
Guns in general seem like something that should already be antiquated.
Additionally, since the audience needs to "see" the beam, most sci-fi weapons have miserably slow firing rates, enough that on the modern battlefield they would be useless.
"Guns in general seem like something that should already be antiquated."
This comes from a mindset that technology is "tiered" and that later technologies are "better" than earlier ones in all ways. This is caused by watching too much science fiction and/or playing too many video games. It is not how the real universe works. In reality, throwing things really hard at your opponent is likely to be a viable strategy indefinitely. The science fiction technologies that would invalidate this, like Dune's shields, do not seem to be things that exist in the real universe.
That wasn't really what I was going for. What I was thinking was actually efficiency. Of course projectiles will always be effective, but they are not the most efficient. Technology tends towards an increase in efficiency, and inefficient technologies are often supplanted by new ones (swords being largely displaced by guns, muzzle loading weapons being largely replaced by automatic, etc).
If the point is to eliminate an adversary's existence, I can imagine that in thousands of years more efficient means will have been invented. But you're probably right that it doesn't make for exciting television.
Almost all space scifi has FTL, wormholes, warp drive or jump drive out of necessity, otherwise you're rather limited in travel. Even the Expanse allows for it at some point, after allowing for the super high efficiency fusion drive just to make travel around the Solar System reasonably fast enough. It's a necessary plot device, unless you're doing a generational ship or staying close to home.
Also most of the Three-Body Problem trilogy, there is no FTL until the very end when they jump forward by aeons.
There is a definite sliding scale. Make your Sci-Fi too hard and you just have science and no fiction. But its not that hard to stick to the "One Big Lie" rule. If the expanse and the Martian can do it then so can everyone else.