God help us.It's dead Jim it's dead...

Do they really get enough money somehow from being "woke" that they can afford to pay for this crap?

Doubtful, due to Star Trek being much more of a niche franchise than the MCU or Star Wars, and Kurtzman Trek has proven divisive, and doesn't have as much merchandise as actual Trek does.

Might be a case of them going into debt in the hopes of profits later on, or it's being paid by sales to other countries

Hopefully those other countries don't declare war on us in retaliation.

For those still claiming that STD and Picard are successful.Both recently aired or started airing here on regular cable TV so now we have hard and concrete facts . STD has been airing on Spike TV (a Paramount subsidiary) and here in The Netherlands it had 144,000 viewers on average. More telling are the numbers for Picard which started airing here on July the 25th on a local channel Veronica it had 358,000 viewers on the 25th on August the 1st that number had dropped off to 241,000 viewers and last Sunday it only had 212,000 viewers. Note both shows were already available on Netflix and Amazon Prime.

What about The Orville on Spike TV? The numbers appear to be even lower. I get the impression that science fiction isn't that popular anymore. It'd be nice to have the (real) ratings of the streaming services - e.g. Amazon Prime Video, Paramount Plus, Netflix - that also have these shows.

Well the numbers of The Orville were slightly higher with around 160,000 viewers on Spike TV although it doesn't really say much since most people probably watch the Orville on Comedy Central which is a more widely available network and more popular over here.