I'm not well versed in fiction. I am curious though, is there a subset of authors that are more into comprehensive world building than Douglas Adams? Would JK Rowling respond the same way? I suspect not
JK Rowling exercised similar authority in the world she created for Harry Potter, as the Muggle Prime Minister was never named and naming the Prime Minister Sir John Major or Tony Blair would have done a similar disservice to that world.
You are right about technology references being jarring. I nearly died laughing while reading the Wrath of Khan about a decade after its release. The size of a game mentioned in the book was dwarfed by games at the time I was reading it by over an order of magnitude.
I get it. I've done extensive worldbuilding for a couple of stories, and it can be a lot of fun! You find yourself researching everything from the geological and climatological history of Earth to the detailed mechanics of gravitational slingshots. And then most of that ends up not really mattering all that much to the story, because for the most part what matters in a story is the characters and their relationships, and the worldbuilding mainly goes to determining what situations and circumstances can feasibly arise. And then you probably end up throwing out or reworking a bunch of it anyway, when you have a compelling scene that the research says can't happen, and the scene does more for the story than all the worldbuilding in the world.
Worldbuilding is best done with caution and in moderation - it's useful to an extent, but it can also easily become a rabbit hole at the cost of the story it's meant to support. You'll rarely err by spending less time in research and more with the characters whose stories you are after all trying to tell.
(Granted, given Adams' prior experience as a Doctor Who scriptwriter that gave rise to his most famous series, and also his legendary work-shyness, I don't really credit him with having thought the whole thing far enough through to identify the general case. But who cares? His most famous series is famous for a reason, and I've never really felt the lack of a concordance describing the complete history of the Vogon bureaucracy or a Wikipedia page about Milliways.)
For those authors who do a lot of world-building, the reader never sees 90-99% of the world that is built. The purpose of doing that world building is to have a scaffold on which the story can be hung, and which will help keep the story self-consistent.
As a reader, you don’t need to know why a character had a particular relationship with their parents in a certain way, or what the nature of that relationship was. However, the nature of that relationship might drive a number of critical choices that the character would make, and therefore drive the story in a particular direction.
I know that for my own characters I’ve created for role-playing games, I can get quite creative in their backstory, and write many pages on the subject. Most of that will never, ever show up in any game that I play, but I can also guarantee that all of it will inform choices that the character makes as we go through the campaign.
IMO, the Silmarillion made for good worldbuilding. But not so good as an actual story.
> Someone told me that Harry Potter is supposed to take place between 1991 and 1998 which is ridiculous because not once in seven books does a single character say, "Man the Chicago Bulls are having a hell of a run huh?".
The level of importance of world building really depends on what the goal is. I don't think h2g2 would have been majorly improved by a lot of world building, but I can appreciate the world building that's been done for Pratchett's Discworld, though that's as much a reflection on the length of that series than Pratchett's priorities
In hard sf, scientific plausibility is a major desideratum - Andy Weir's The Martian is a widely known recent example, with the entire story built on a foundation of entirely plausible near-future space engineering. (It's also a somewhat rare example in which this focus on feasibility does not come at the cost of characterization.)
In the related but distinct high-concept sf, the story is designed around a given concept such as "what if humans became telepathic?" or "what if FTL communication was possible but FTL travel was not?", and serves to explore the consequences of this idea in great detail. Unlike hard sf, the concept doesn't have to be plausible, but like it, one often encounters stories where the concept outweighs the characters. I think Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time is a good example here, outdoing the reputation of its field by using its concept to tell a compelling and beautiful story that also happens to be about giant sapient jumping spiders.
Steven Erickson, Ian C. Esslemont and their friends spent a decade world building while playing table top games. First Erickson then Esselmont started pouring over that world into the Malazan series.
It is, without question, the largest, most complicated, most inspiring entertaining engaging and satisfying collection of plots, sub plots, sub sub plots, sub sub sub plots, super plots, super super plots and possibly super super super plots. I'm only 2 re-reads in - people who are into their 4th or 5th re-read tell me they are still discovering layers.
The downside is that the first book in the series - Gardens of the Moon - is ridiculously difficult to get started with. There's a read-along blog that Tor did that helped me get through it - but it's still a challenge. I had to downgrade from an audiobook to an ebook and then to a paperback because I kept flipping back to remind myself who someone/something was.
Wheel of Time in particular.