Greg Egan, Iain Banks and Sam Hughes are good stuff, if you haven’t.
Also, there’s this amazing new genre, “LitRpg”. Basically fantasy where an rpg type videogame became real.
Most of it is the usual dreck but some of it goes hard sf, delving into the existential stuff.
A couple of the rationalists have even taken a swing.
Try
Mother of Learning
Death after death
Friendship is optimal
So ya, real development is still alive.
But you don’t need spaceships and aliens to do that. It’s just fetishwear at that point.
In real scifi it isn’t fetishwear. It actually serves a purpose.