They made a lot of dumb mistakes in TOS, and the science in it often completely sucks, but TOS fortunately was not about the futuristic science. It was about the people and about their issues.
It wasn't about alien people in a far-away galaxy, it was about us.
The technology in TOS was more humanized than in previous science fiction fare. The interiors of Kirk's Enterprise looked practical and livable. The technology empowered Kirk and crew, but it didn't make gods of them. Sometimes the transporter failed, sometimes the consoles caught fire. But they were overall empowered to do many fantastic new things, and this was thrilling. The technology made it possible for them to have solved many of our old problems - poverty and hunger were a thing of the past - but it also brought the people into contact with a whole new set of problems.
The solution to the new problems they encountered wasn't always obvious. How do you deal with a guy who keeps moving a whole planet into your path and blocking your way? Nobody had run into that kind of thing before, and Kirk often had to improvise like a madman. Fortunately, he was talented at it.
TOS apparently (on the surface) is the Captain Kirk story. I don't think they originally intended for it to be the Captain Kirk story - I believe they intended for it to be an ensemble show - but Kirk turned out to be too much fun to play with, and they couldn't leave him alone. Latter day Treks are more about ~everybody~, but TOS really was Kirk-focused, but for good reason: Kirk was a particularly interesting hero.
At the time TOS was new, Spock was a really new kind of alien, and the public went nuts about him. To the viewers at the time, TOS was the Spock-in-space show. Spock was such a delightful character that for a while people were almost completely distracted from noticing that Kirk was a very different kind of hero.
How fabulously different Kirk was flew in under the radar of people's conscious awareness. It's as if Spock was the flashy lure that attracted us near, and the Kirk phenomenon just swallowed us whole with a single gulp. We felt no pain, because we felt no teeth. It just dawned on us slowly, decade by slow decade, that Spock and Kirk were actually parts of the same creature, and that we had become it without even noticing it was happening.
TOS changed the universe. You youngsters who were born in the belly of the beast notice no big difference, but people my age and older who remember when it happened know what I am talking about.
Kirk and Spock together are why the future, why everything, is different now. All Trek since then has been comparatively anticlimactic. You know that saying, "everything is over but the shouting"? Well, we are living in the shouting part.
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