They had a lot of crossover, IIRC, and several sci-fi writers got involved with scripts. There's some brilliant concept plots, and even in some of the really dated ones you can still see what they were going for.
Discovery and Picard were libshit shows that hated every premise of Star Trek, basically. Others often struggled with them, or outright challenged them, but Discovery and Picard were outright nasty in that particular bullishly ignorant way.