The Expanse is set in the 23rd century. While it shares that with the original Star Trek, its expectations for technological advancements are far more modest - there's no warp drive, and while humanity has managed to colonize the solar system, the only group even contemplating interstellar travel is a sect of Mormons who have commissioned the largest space ship ever built, the Nauvoo, to serve as a generation ship to travel another star system over the course of hundreds, maybe even over a thousand years (oh, and the ship never actually winds up being used that way).
Another sci-fi show I've started watching is Raised by Wolves, which has incredible technology that includes androids indistinguishable from humans, interstellar travel, and weapons that can apparently disintegrate an individual human target with sound waves. And this one is set in the 22nd Century.
Essentially, if there's one thing that sci-fi authors profoundly don't agree on, it's the rate at which we can expect technology to advance. Sometimes, there's an in-universe explanation for the advancement of technology - I believe in Raised by Wolves, the sudden jump in technological prowess is thanks to the discovery of alien messages in the scripture of an (in our time at least) obscure religion from about 2000 years ago.
But I also think this returns us in part to the question of "hard" versus "soft" sci-fi that I wrote about a couple posts ago on this blog.
I think the clearest way to explain hard sci-fi versus soft sci-fi is how many logical leaps it takes for one to arrive at the kind of technology we see in the story. For example, a lot of sci-fi stories give their spaceships and space station artificial gravity, which seems to be achieved through some technology that is generally unexplained. In The Expanse, though, rather than going through some convoluted idea of "gravity plating" that seems like it would be very energy-inefficient, instead the world has the "Epstein Drive," a much more fuel-efficient fusion drive that simply accelerates a ship at 1G until the ship gets about halfway to its destination, at which point the ship just turns around and starts decelerating instead, again at 1G. Thus, the engine becomes "down" for your ship. While the engineering and scientific breakthroughs that would be required to make an engine that can sustain that level of thrust over the course of an entire interplanetary trip is itself a kind of mysterious and undiscovered technology, the physical basis for artificial gravity is thus fairly plausible.
Different audiences engage with sci-fi for different reasons. And, indeed, I think you could count this kind of "crunchy" hard sci-fi to almost be a different genre (another great example is The Martian, whose author has joked with the authors of The Expanse that their stories take place within the same fictional timeline).
Where I get a bit defensive, though, is when people claim that this form of science fiction is inherently superior.
When Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek, he was less interested in the technological ideas behind it than the sociological ones. He wanted to address things like racism and the Cold War in a metaphorical way that allowed him to raise issues that were considered too controversial for the time. Additionally, he wanted to portray a positive vision of the future, which included egalitarianism around race and gender. As someone who was born about 20 years after Star Trek first came on the air, it never seemed that revolutionary that there was a black woman who was one of the senior officers on the Enterprise, but for the 1960s, that was a pretty big deal (to be honest, though, I think that growing up in a household that held similar values to the ones expressed by Star Trek, I didn't realize that it was, in fact, still a bit revolutionary in the 1980s).
In Star Trek, many of the aliens that the crew of the Enterprise meet are very human-like. Some look identical or near-identical to humans, and many look like humans but with prosthetics (the design of the Klingons shifted significantly in the third Star Trek movie, making them look somewhat more alien with the ridged foreheads).
Now, I think most people think that if there are aliens out there (and given the size of the universe, it's not at all irrational to think that there are) the likelihood of their looking anything like us is profoundly small. So, the idea of human-like aliens is typically considered a "soft sci-fi" trope.
But it serves a purpose - aliens in hard sci-fi are usually depicted as extremely mysterious, if they're even depicted at all. Humanoid aliens, though, allow us to imagine new cultures that are different than our own but nevertheless revolve around the same basic experience and needs. Mind you, Star Trek does have plenty of truly alien aliens - weird slimes, intelligent crystalline structures, etc., but by allowing for a somewhat bigger leap of logic than the existence of The Expanse's Epstein Drive, it allows them to tell stories that you couldn't do if you tried to keep things extremely hard.
I think that ultimately, hard science fiction is ultimately just a methodology for maintaining the willing suspension of disbelief. All fiction relies on this, and it's a nuanced thing. Just as we might be pulled out of a story by a character acting in a way that seems contrary to what we've learned about them so far (except when that's a deliberate reversal within the drama) we might be pulled out of a narrative when an element of the fictional reality becomes too unbelievable.
I had a moment like this when watching one of the early episodes of Fringe - a show from about a decade ago that I think was meant to be the next Lost (it was created by J. J. Abrams) but never took off in popularity. I actually wound up liking the show once it got over some of its awkwardness in the first season. But there was an episode in which a group of women give birth to babies who swiftly age into full-grown adults and then die of old age within minutes.
I remember feeling pulled out of this because it occurred to me that a person only grows in size because, you know, they take on matter through eating. These babies were ballooning to adult size without any clear source of material.
My friend Tim poo-poo'd this criticism with a trope he likes to call "A Magic Carpet Could Never Turn a Corner Like That at That Speed," i.e. a needlessly picky critique applying real world logic to a fantastical situation. But I do think that the somewhat (somewhat) more grounded sci-fi the show was trying to portray itself as having put my criticism within reasonable grounds.
The point is that you set up an expectation in the audience as to how critical we should be of its realism. Human-looking aliens showing up in The Expanse is a pretty huge stretch, but it's to be expected in Star Trek.
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