Sorry, I didn't mean to deride the title. I think the article was based on a good idea (Star Trek is post-scarcity and people will read articles on Star Trek), but went down the rabbit hole trying to justify its title (by dwelling on analysis of Star Trek, which is a hopeless task).

I think a better approach would be to look at markets that are already post-scarcity or approaching post-scarcity. E.g. entertainment, many kinds of information, and software. What happens when the price of things gets so low that the cost becomes finding the thing you want rather than getting access to it?

In the world of open source (which isn't post-scarcity, but is similar in that people do stuff for "free" and so they aren't incented by money) we see what I refer to as the "economy of interestingness" where things programmers are interested in get lots of attention (3d game engines, web browsers, programming languages, editors) while things programmers don't care about are horribly neglected (e.g. accounting software, email clients)

I hear you.

Sometimes though you need a bit of a fictional narrative to help push thinking past the constraints if nothing else as inspiration and motivation.

But I am sure there are more rational ways to approach this.