The headline should come as no surprise, since it follows the events of Star Trek Discovery. However, there was always the possibility that the producers would make some effort to rectify the many, many mistakes and oversights of STD, but… nope. While it is too early to judge whether or not the show is any good, given the people behind it are largely those responsible for STD and STP, skepticism about it emerging as anything but lamentable trash is warranted. That said, several details about the show make it perfectly clear that it is not set in the same continuity as “Star Trek:”
1: The Gorn are discussed. Given that this show is set more than a decade before TOS, and the Gorn weren’t known to the Federation until Kirk & Co. ran into them…
2: Some history of Earth was dropped: the January 6 2021 Capitol hijinks are shown, and described as a prelude to “the second Civil War,” which led to the Eugenics Wars, which led to World War III. Since the Eugenics wars occurred in the 1990s, it would be tricky for events from 2021 to cause them.
3: A star chart lists the planet “Sarpeidon,” a world that won’t be encountered until Kirk & Co. get there more than a decade later. Given that the planet has a fully functional time machine program that winds up sending the *entire* planetary population elsewhen, the existence of Sarpeidon would have been either one of the biggest military centers of the Federation, or one of the biggest secrets; all the time travel monekymotions of STD Season 2 could have been dispensed with.
On more subjective fronts, none of the characters that carry through from TOS seem to be at all the same characters, just people with the same names. Nurse Chapel, in particular, seems a completely different person. Spock and T’Pring are shown together… and T’Pring proposing marriage to Spock is shown, an odd thing given that theirs was a marriage arranged by their families when they were children, and then they didn’t really have much to do with each other. T’Pring seems quite un-Vulcan as well. The Enterprise itself is an entirely different ship, far more generic sci-fi-flashy and far less character-filled than the classic. The bridge is unrecognizable… much bigger, with a *huge* window up front rather than the somewhat dinky viewscreen from the original.
All in all… unsurprising.