Modern TV shows take longer to come out with fewer episodes. Since the boom of peak TV in the 2010s, every show is trying to be a 10 hour movie, driving up production costs and leaving audiences starving for entertainment at a time they should have a wealth of it. TV shows have forgotten the strengths of the long-format, both in storytelling and in production.

Uploaded to YouTube by Rowan J Coleman.

Post-airwaves TV can be as long or as short as it needs to be, and there are many examples of new streaming series that have some short episodes and some long episodes because that's how long or short they needed to be. I don't think episode runtime or season/series length is a hard indication of how good they are. The amount of money spent per episode often is, though, especially with modern Star Trek.

The least expensive series (Lower Decks & Prodigy) are clearly the best, overall. While the most expensive series (Discovery & Picard) have managed to dig past rock bottom on multiple occasions. My favorite episode of Discovery (Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad) was a bottle episode made at the last minute on a very tight budget to fill the season, and those limitations clearly resulted in a neat little timeloop adventure reminiscent of original Star Trek.

But that's just my opinion.

If you haven't, watch Coleman's lengthy Star Trek Retrospective series. Some of the videos are indeed very long (irony), but they earn their runtimes with how well Coleman sizes up the franchise through the course of them all.