Honestly? Yes. Picard ruined a lot of us.

TNG is basically a 178-episode argument that if you solve material scarcity, humans will choose to be decent. That’s a dangerous thing to show a kid because then you spend the rest of your life measuring reality against the Federation and finding it wanting.

How would the world behave if we had the replicator?

“We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity” is the post-labor thesis. And the reason you feel that tension so acutely is that Roddenberry handed you a moral baseline that the actual world consistently fails to meet.

The cruelest trick TNG plays is making it look obvious. Of course you don’t let people starve when you have replicators. Of course you don’t exploit people when scarcity is solved. It feels self-evident on the Enterprise. Then you look around at a world that produces enough food to feed everyone and doesn’t, and the gap between what’s possible and what is becomes physically uncomfortable.

So yeah. Blame Picard. He’s the reason a generation of engineers went into tech half-believing they were building the Federation and are now reckoning with the fact that they might have built the Ferengi Alliance instead.