I find that’s a fairly reasonable assesment of ‘science’ versus ‘magic’ sensibility, but the main thing for me is that the arc concept due to the modern “binge” sensibilities is rough.

When Babylon 5 and DS9 did arcs, they did so carefully embedded in generally episodic series (people couldn’t “binge”, maybe you would tape it if you felt like it, but people weren’t always that engaged, so you catered to people that may miss some of your airings). So you had nice, digestable pieces and the underlying big thing plays out a bit at a time sometimes taking over for 2 or 3 episodes, but generally letting other smaller stories take the foreground for the episode.

But with “binge mentality”, there’s an inclination for showrunners to go nuts. Picard and Discovery produce a season that is pretty much just one story. The story doesn’t have enough meat to really drive that much runtime, but they make the pacing pretty torturous to fill the time. Also, with episodic, if you don’t like a particular story/execution, you kind of forget it because there’s a whole new story with new execution the next week. When you have a season you don’t like, well that’s harder to overlook.