The older star trek also usually had one story in each episode, and just a little bit of an overarching plot, so much of the time of the episode was actually used to tell a story.

Discovery adopted this soap-like storytelling, where there is one long story broken up into episodes. Each episode has something interesting at the start, then just a lot of filler, and when it finally starts to get interesting again the episode is over and they spoil half of the next episode with the “coming next” segment.

So instead of making something people want to watch because its interesting, they just manipulate you to watch it because they string you along.

Picard does the same, but at least they have some interesting content in the middle of an episode sometimes.