What Makes Star Trek, Star Trek?
Try a thought experiment in two directions. Take everything people point at when they call something Star Trek: the Enterprise, the uniforms, the phasers, the Vulcans, even the Federation itself. Strip all of it out. Could a story still feel unmistakably like Trek with none of that in frame? Now run it the other way. Keep every ship, every delta, every familiar alien, and remove only the ideas underneath them. Would that still be Trek, or just cosplay with a budget? Hold both questions at once, because the gap between them is where the answer lives.