> Because in trying to tell that kind of interesting story today, the creators would force the current day politics and other bullshit into it and make that the front and center instead of the cool math or science stuff.
That's always been the case. If you look at Star Trek, the TOS Klingons were a very thinly veiled reference to the Soviet Union, the Federation was the USA (and in some cases not even thinly veiled, they had an episode where Kirk was "yo, sounds like you're quoting the constitution"); the whole of The Undiscovered Country was chock full of similarly themed memes with Praxis being Chernobyl, "Shakespeare is best in the original Klingon" was the kind of thing that the Soviet Union was famous for doing[0] with all the culture they liked, and with Rura Penthe being a very obvious reference to a Siberian Gulag.
TNG comes around, over a thousand people on the ship, statistically speaking 50 or so are probably gay… none are mentioned because that was just before "don't ask, don't tell" was introduced, which itself was a mild improvement on "we will discharge you for this". Even the attempt at an LGBT episode (the planet which had eliminated gender and brainwashed anyone who still had one) only got the T, and not the LGB parts.
DS9's handling of the Bajorans feels to me like it was riffing on then-current US attitudes towards the Mujahideen (who were still broadly seen as a positive because they had kicked the Soviets out of Afghanistan and 9/11 had not yet happened) and the Provisional IRA (who were, when the show began, still engaged in armed conflict with the government of the UK).
Enterprise's Archer felt like Bush Jr, and the Xindi arc felt like it was done as a reference to the 9/11 attacks (I don't know how much of a delay there is between scriptwriters experiencing real life and the result hitting the airwaves).
Every show you've ever seen has something like this, just to get distributed. But these days, we've got more options for distribution, so you're not limited to your own country's Overton Window for "what counts as art and not filth that corrupts the minds of our youth", so you can much more easily access things that those around you would revile you for — be that smoking tobacco or marijuana, or depicting casual consumption of pork or beef like those aren't حَرَام or अघ्न्या (in Islamic and Hindu cultures respectively), or which you are upset more about out of nipples and guns.
[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InTheOriginalKli...