A long time ago, Star Trek had some decent writers writers, many of whom were classic science fiction authors. Now all they have is a bunch of younger screenwriters that do not have a lot of life experience. Yeah, TOS and TNG could be cheesy at times but most of the episodes had substance. Kurtzman's Trek is like a CW show that's written for teenagers. SNW is definitely strange and new but it's not very good.
You have a point but there's a pretty big difference between something like a statistics textbook and the novel "Dune" for instance. One was specifically written to teach mostly pre-existing ideas and the other was created as entertainment to sell to a wide an audience as possible.
I'm 65 now. When I was a kid, I was relatively patriotic. Civil rights, moon landing, all that stuff. Now? Not so much. The US is still much better than many other countries but it's not the world leader that used to be.
I used it up to the early 2000's and it just seemed to slow down. I recently did a series of synthetic benchmarks on all the browsers and Firefox was the slowest of the batch. It's still the only browser left not built on chromium I think. Opera GX was the fastest in terms of benchmarking.
No Empire lasts forever.