I love the show and in some ways it is easily the best of Trek, but it shouldn't go unmentioned that shit like Profit and Lace exists which is extremely frustrating, like trying to beat the "haha man in a girl costume haha" joke into the ground so much even the actor(who is a real good guy too) spoke out against hating it, and it is even more disappointing because the top of DS9 talent worked on that too written by Ira and with a nod of approval from Piller? Yep nope.
Its a black spot on an otherwise amazing show though, always remember don't hold hollywood libs as heroes and don't expect to get burned at some point.
It also shouldn't go unmentioned that the producers on the show prevented a lot of queer stuff from happening. There's the episode of TNG where Frakes falls in love with a non-binary alien (who I believe was supposed to be played by a man, but was ultimately played by a woman) and then there's all of Garak and Bashir, which only has a queer subtext due to the actors.
I love the shows, but like you said they were made by a lot of people and some of those people weren't great.
Frakes is a mensch. He'd been talking about how he wanted a male actor in that guest role for decades. Who would have guessed in the mid 1980s that the man brought on for the Kirk Womanizer 2.0 role would have turned out to be among the best LGBT+ allies in the franchise, playing a character who had a basically flawless record for wanting extremely clear consent from partners?
Sometimes I wonder what TNG would have been like if Stewart had left the show after season 3 with Frakes taking on top billing. We might have even been spared the awful TNG movies where Stewart's ego took over the writing room.
My wife's been showing me Arrested Development so I know where all those memes came from, and while parts of the show are clever, "gay lol" "man in a girl costume lol" and even "creeping on children lol" are all recurring punchlines and it's like a minefield of decades expired edginess to get to the good parts.
Especially given the instances in the show where the actors wanted things to be more queer, but weren't allowed. Frakes with the non-binary alien and Bashir/Garak come to mind. "It was the 90s" doesn't work when several people on the show wanted more queer stuff and (as said above) didn't approve of the homophobic shit that made it in.
The only good thing about Profit and Lace is that it shows that any type of gender transformation is a single day out-patient procedure in the Federation, which implies that pretty much anyone in the Trek universe could be trans.