But even discarding cinema (Star Wars famously being a samurai movie set in space), most sci-fi books written after the golden age, are focused on societal changes and people. Stories are metaphors for our world.
That is fine, fiction that cannot be related to rarely gets read.
Bobiverse is a nerd's power trip fantasy. 90% of what Heinlein wrote is just "external observations on sociey".
Even Greg Egan, who writes super hard sci-fi (his books have footnotes linked to actual science papers!) has his novels largely focus around societies and people (or aliens that are easily related to!)
It has honestly been 80 or so years since science fiction was mostly "here are a few poorly fleshed out people, and some really damn good science!"
I've read a lot of those stories, they are cool and I kind of miss them, but honestly almost every major plot point possible was already thought up by the boards of scientists turned sci-fi authors of the 1930s through 50s. An occasional new story of that type makes its way out now and then (some of the SCP stories are actually this in a very pure form), but IMHO that genre of pure science writing with minimal focus on people or society is 99.9% dead.