I think this is an extremely lousy headline, but the content is good.
Firstly, the headline slightly misquotes what Matalas actually said (emphasis added):
“We wrote nine episodes at one point and the network was like, ‘No, we don’t really understand this, it’s a bit too sci-fi, it’s a bit too in-Star Trek.’”
I think a story being a little too “inside baseball” and reliant on stuff from decades ago is a perfectly valid note, especially when we’re talking about ideas like this:
The idea was that Guinan’s bar was presented as a normal bar in Los Angeles, but if you knew the right thing to do, you could go into the back through the telephone phone booth and that was Rick’s Café and it was a stopping point for all these different species that were actually there on Earth with a ‘Do not interfere’ thing happening.
The stuff about COVID messing with the writing and shooting schedule is understandable, and created problems that can be seen in many TV shows filmed around that time. All the same, it makes me wish they had decompressed the schedule and not rushed through things as much as they did.
The comments about there being a lot of different ideas in season two are interesting, since I think she overall series’ biggest flaw is that it crammed a lot of ideas, many of which I like quite a bit, into only 30 episodes, with few (none?) of them being fully explored.
And regarding the Jurati Borg…I don’t know, I never found that confusing in the slightest. I think their intent came through just fine.