To be fair, I wouldn’t rate the season itself very highly. Lots of the plots were quite predictable. Like in the space episode you know something’s gonna go wrong with sharing the chip almost immediately.
Granted, I didn’t expect murder, but I don’t think that minor surprise makes up for an otherwise predictable episode.
I’m putting aside all the problems I have with that technology somehow existing back then too. The thing is, the episode doesn’t need that technology really, and it’s kind of used just as a lazy way to link their families together. There is no strong insight into whether it’s an upside or downside, and as you said, it’d be much better to send the replicas to space by far.
The technology could be explored in so many more interesting ways and it just wasn’t. What about wars, sports, politicians? I’m sure all of them would use the technology in different ways.
The netflix episode was similarly lazy, instead of exploring any interesting influences or social aspects of having a show show off your life, instead it becomes some really lazy computer in a computer thing where oh we have to destroy the quantummajig and it’s all magically fixed. That’s not thought provoking, it just kinda is.