It’s been there since TOS.

It isn’t lazy writing, it’s the necessity of long term writing for a series.

If you take the tos concept of “wagon train in space” as the starting point, if you want to maintain a multiple season show, you have to explore every idea you can come up with. You discard the ones that don’t fit the vibe, or you tear them apart until they do. But you have a deadline, budgets, and an ever-critical audience.

So, you get episodes like the one (s3e8 TOS) being rewatched in that community. A zero stakes illness, some hand wavy tech, and a single episode romance that amounts to a pile of meh. They can’t all be winners, and Voyager had and extra limitation in that it was expected to do a roughly TOS journey, with TNG baggage, and still manage to not retread plots too obviously.

It isn’t lazy, and I’d argue that it isn’t bad writing either, as Voyager usually managed to keep characterization on point and didn’t fuck up with major contradictions often.

In universe, you had people far from home, unsure if they’d ever get back, surrounded by strangers and emitted enemies. So the crew slipped a lot. It fits well enough as a head canon that only the really egregiously bad stuff can’t maintain immersion.

But it’s the nature of series writing. You always run into a “what the fuck do we do this week?” wall. It’s really rare for a show to have a long enough commitment that there’s real planning involved the way Babylon 5 worked out. Where you can tell the big story and fill in little bits in episodes rather than having to shove little bits of big story into one-off episodes.

I’ve done some amateur grade serial writing. If you don’t start off with the big picture in place, every chapter is a wrestling match between the idea you’ve got now and how it fits in the long term. It’s fucking brutal sometimes. I’m struggling with one now that’s likely to end up with the same level of “really? That’s what happens?” just because too much stagnation while trying to get the idea to take shape makes it less likely to. You have to push with what you can make work… I have to push with what I can make work so that it doesn’t die entirely.

Imagine that kind of situation on a budget, a deadline, and whatever exchanges directors and producers throw into the mix. I seriously doubt I could do it. It’s its own skill set.