It's about interference with non-Federation governments and cultures in general. The Prime Directive forbids mucking about with Romulan politics, for instance. Worf gets away with a lot of things that would violate the Prime Directive in regards to the Klingon Government because he has dual citizenship and is a member of Klingon nobility.

The ban on contact with pre-warp civilizations is also more specifically uncontacted pre-warp civilizations (you can chat with them if they're already buying Romulan ale from the Ferengi because the damage has already been done) and more generally pre-interstellar civilizations (warp drive is the usual way a civilization becomes interstellar, but there are alternative methods).

I still want the story of the one mousey, overworked lieutenant junior grade whose job it is to follow-up on all prime directive violations.

Investigator: Alright, Captain, let's begin, shall we? Apparently you and your crew intervened in a labour dispute between two independent worlds, and taught the previously exploited civilization about unions, and now their entire social development has radically shifted. Is there anything in that basic statement you'd like to dispute?
Captain: Uh...when did this happen?
Investigator: Stardate 43012.7.
Captain: That was eight months ago!
Investigator: Correct. I've had an entire backlog to work my way through, and this is the earliest I was able to address your situation.
Captain: Five months ago my entire ship was trapped in a time vortex and we all deaged to adolescence.
Investigator: ...I did think you looked rather young.
Captain: We don't even have any memory of those events, but it does sound pretty dope. Surely you can't hold us responsible for actions we haven't yet committed, and might not actually commit if we were put into similar circumstances again.

All of this could be avoided if they'd just rename it to the Mind Your Own Business Directive.

It’s going to be a long road for Paramount, and the Star Trek franchise, to get past it American-centric blinkers.

IDIC seems to be an in-America rather than a global or universal concept for the executives and even most of the EPs.

Defining ‘television history’ as just what was broadcast in the United States is all of a piece of Hollywood’s century-long understanding that it was the global entertainment focal point.

Paramount is strategically moving to emphasize development and production outside the United States, and recently cut its domestic staff significantly. However, Paramount’s own communications team seems to remain quite blindly American-centric as if Paramount+ can survive on the US market alone. Geoblocked embedded video, predominantly American feature article writers and editors on the StarTrek.com official site, are all evidence of the persistent blind spot.

But it’s hurt the franchise. There’s a kind of Federation Exceptionalism baked in that comes across as an expansion of American exceptionalism. When all the hero captains other than Picard, and many of the bridge crew, are identified as coming from what is currently the United States, it says that the US is still the most important place and marginalizes other countries.

Star Trek’s impact outside North America has been constrained by these attitudes going back to the 1960s.

Canadians, used to crossborder transmissions of US networks tend to roll with it, to the point that Star Trek shows are often the most popular dramas, and not just in the sci-fi genre. The UK and Germany got TNG in syndication, which built their base, but in much of the world Star Trek only became broadly accessible through Netflix.

And what we hear in social media platforms like this one is that fans outside the US, who are attracted to and embrace Trek’s aspirational values, find these kinds of persistent markers of inward-looking American attitudes an irritant, at some points like nails on chalkboard, standing out against what Trek aspires to be.

And when Enterprise did that, there were fans who insisted it was a retcon. It's something people beleived since TOS even though it was contradicted pretty soon after the Federation was even established.

There are several other things that fans have been certain of since the 60s (like saucer separation being irreversible in the field or Vulcans only having sex during Pon Farr) that weren't the production intention, but this one was blatantly impossible and it's very strange.

She joined the United Earth Starfleet, though. If someone wanted to get really pedantic, they could claim there's a possibility she resigned her commission before the transition to the Federation Starfleet.

But yeah, T'Pol, the senior staff of the USS Intrepid, the various admirals we've seen in Disco and SNW, all would have joined Starfleet before Spock.

@concrete_baby @rdh worf is like an adult religious convert who understands certain rules to be inflexible that people who grew up in the religion understand to be optional at best