Not that Federation was a society that could function either... I'm not sure deeply about others, but in general it felt that most of them would fail.
It’s also worth noting that the Ferengi were space worthy centuries before humans and one of the reasons speculated for their stagnation was the placement of greed above all else.
:)
Also if you really think that everything goes through replicators, what does that mean for energy expenditure? If done on planets where does all the energy go?
And don't everyone else have those two things too? So why did Cardassia need mining outpost?
The thing is, the mechanism of the Replicator is less important then what it represents: productivity with zero human labor input. We don't live in that world - we have trouble conceiving of that world. But that's essentially the whole promise of AI: robots which can build more robots, which can then build products for us.
At some point, your whole civilizations pipeline becomes "energy + robot labor". And once you get the first part of the Dyson swarm up and running, energy is infinite - at least in human terms.
So I’m ok with replicators being a lazy plot device. It’s not like there aren’t countless others, like transporters, the usage of large mother ships rather than lots of smaller vessels, universal translators, 3D geometry presented in 2D, every species being bipedal, etc.
The point behind Star Trek is that it presents the best of humanity rather than the worst — which is what most other popular sci-fi stories focus on.