This has been done to death, but I think a lot of the Voyager discourse needs a reframing.
The most important thing to note about Voyager is that it isn't a story about two ideologically opposed crews and assorted hangers-on joining together to survive alone in some distant corner of the galaxy. That's what its pilot sets up, sure, but Paramount did a creative arson and demanded a TNG-reboot-kinda-thing instead. People tend to forget that Voyager was ultimately forced to reject its own premise and adopt a light-hearted, low-tension tone – and when they complain about Voyager they're normally complaining about that.
Like, the most memorable Voyager commentary for me is about the inconsistencies that result from this. The explanation for the shuttle bays:
The torpedo count:
There's that one interview with Ron Moore where he goes ape at Voyager too. And the common gags, including how Kim remains an ensign for seven years, how they have energy crises one week and fuck about on the holodeck the next, and so on.
And then the complaint about how "they never even made it to Earth". This just further illustrates the point: the show isn't interested in the crew's return home, and rolls credits as soon as the week's concept (blow up Alice Krige) is done. They're only put in the Alpha Quadrant so everyone's sure there won't be an eighth series. And, of course, endless complaints about the reset button.
It seems that, as a whole, the Trek community has agreed that, whatever the quality of the show, it's fake. Like, fake by its own standards. It has no functional diegesis.
That isn't a criticism though. Voyager doesn't need a solid canon. Why would it? It's a concept show. Every week a crazy concept is introduced, batted about a bit, and then discarded once we've had our fun. Loads of shows (normally comedies) adopt this kind of canon mechanic, where any given episode can either invoke or ignore previous events as required. Lower Decks is one of those. The Simpsons is another. Spongebob Squarepants would do tremendous damage to people/settings in the space of 11 minutes and then have it somehow undone offscreen in time for the next story, and we don't care. The reset button is just a tool that allows writers to really take stories to their limits, and I like seeing that opportunity taken. Voyager relies on the reset button just as much as these other shows, and that isn't a criticism either.
But it's not like the criticism of Voyager isn't fair either – and one place where I fully agree with it is this: Voyager always makes us watch the reset buttons' being pressed. We spend the final act of every episode bluntly and painfully undoing whatever crazy things went on, as though we're meant to believe it's all actually happened. Torres was split out into human and Klingon halves? We watch the doc fix it. Janeway turns into a fish? The doc fixes it and they shrug it off(???). Doc has a breakdown? Doc fixed it. Ship blows up? Timey-wimey fixeroony. Someone breaks Janeway's rules? They're just on report. Janeway pulls some batshit stunt? Chakotay simply rolls over. It's so stupid. It wastes so much time. I feel my soul leaving my body watching the show try to weave these incompatible ideas into a single thread. Why bother? Couldn't they roll credits instead?
If Voyager had just committed to being what it so obviously was, I think I'd like it (so far at least). Bogged down by all these 'reset scenes', it becomes this weird but earnest mess of contradictions and inconsistencies, and I just come away from it confused. Baffling stuff.