It mirrored the contemporary idea of the “End of History”, where all the existational crises were done with, the federation (was basically moving into a time of refinement rather than having to worry that the experiment might still utterly and completely fail. TNG was basically one long, slow lesson of why that was a flawed notion. You don’t build a cruise liner, fill it with families, and then intentionally send it into the kind of peril that regularly befitted the Enterprise D. In retrospect, it was completely ridiculous.