Hey, that's pretty cool! This post made me catch up on the newest season.
Star Trek has, from where I'm standing, always had a problem presenting the Federation as the socialist utopia that it quite explicitly is. It feels like some of the series wanted to veer away from that implication, or that a lot of the writers didn't know how to handle writing conflict within a post-scarcity super society. I think we all know how inconsistent it is with money, exchange between civilizations, etc.
Which is a shame, because I watch Star Trek exactly for the fully automated gay space communist fantasies.
Yeah, I made this post in the first 5 minutes of the episode. It's a time travel episode.
Previously we've had time travel situations on Trek that make a joke of it (e.g. haha the heroes of our story don't know what money is), but this time the travelling characters eere a bit more on the nose about how dystopian it is to them that they need currency for food and shelter.