Ask Lemmygrad

Using the Original Series episodes for this examination is a bit unfair. That show was on a shoestring budget and they were making up the world building as they went along. Thr futuristic post scarcity utopia thing came more with TNG. In the time between TOS and TNG, Roddenberry wasn't getting much TV work and did the convention circuit a lot where he was worshipped a bit too much and too often by fans and was also a beatnik sex guy who was drinking and doing pills a lot and started believing his own hype. Star Trek always presented a better future and something to strive towards but in TOS the society and economic model was shown to still be pretty similar to 1966 America (tos had currency, it gets mentioned often), but it the time between with Roddenberry's ego getting pumped and him attending Q&A sessions where he'd just make shit up about the world building. By the time TNG came around he had all these half baked utopian ideas going around his drug addled brain and was given wayyyy too much creative control at the start of tng and took things too far in many places like arguing that a child wouldn't morn his dead parents cause they were too enlightened for that now. After he died things got rolled back by about a third to a semi reasonable but poorly thought out utopia.