It also felt like it was shoehorning in all the progressiveness for the sake of being progressive which sends the exact opposite message than they hoped for. The crew was so amazingly diverse representing so many different things that any adult would look at it and go "the odds of all these different sexualities/etc. being on one ship at once are so improbable as to be impossible." That makes it feel like pandering, not being progressive. That could work for kids, just being able to see someone like them on screen helps a lot, but Discovery is very much not meant for kids to watch.

Basically they tried too hard and didn't understand what they were doing.

I think it was less humanity's greatness that allowed them to reach the stars in the alternate timeline and more of having no choice but to do so. Earth was a wasteland and they needed more resources beyond what was available in the rest of our solar system. La'an told Kirk at one point that he could be an explorer in her timeline, heavily implying humanity doesn't do that in his.