Over the course of the TNG show, they went back and forth about six times on the question of whether there would even be such a thing as money in the 24th century.

At various points in the original series, TNG, and the TOS movies, they claimed there was no such thing as swearing in the 23rd or 24th centuries. They've completely changed that rule, but they started doing that all the way back in the Generations movie, if not earlier.

And definitely there's a lot of conflict and intrigue going on here that's pretty foreign to the TNG years. Supposedly Roddenberry tried to ban the TNG writers from ever suggesting any conflict or even forceful disagreement between starfleet characters. Any antagonism was supposed to be coming from outside the Federation. Obviously they didn't keep that practice up even through the first years of TNG.

And by the time DS9 started (the best of the Star Trek shows, as far as I'm concerned), the prevalence of Federation "bad guys" got A LOT stronger. We had the great Ben Sisko falsifying evidence to draw the Romulans into a war (one of the best Star Trek episodes, as far as I'm concerned), admirals imprisoning officers to hide their evil schemes, and even the appearance of "section 31", which they've now retconned all the way back to the "Enterprise" show. All this intrigue in the Picard show about a hidden Romulan running Starfleet Intelligence and hiding a secret plot is really just a variant of all those section 31 stories.

As for 20 years: 20 years it a lot of time. 20 years ago, today, is pre-9/11. Obviously American society (which the Federation was always meant to represent) has changed a lot since then -- in many ways for the worse. In the Star Trek canon, they've supposedly had two wars with massive civilian casualties, and an uprising of "synths" on Mars, again with massive civilian casualties, all along with the even bigger changes to Romulan society.

I'll give you the fact that the dystopian elements are pretty banal. Not really new even for Star Trek shows. But I think they're exploiting those tropes well, to tell a much richer story than they normally tend to tell, about loss, frailty, age, and exploitation. They couldn't really do that in TNG, with its episodic structure. I think they started to do something like that in DS9 and attempted to do it at times in Enterprise.