Every legacy Trek fan I know went into Lower Decks bracing for parody. Boimler trips over a console, Mariner cracks a joke, roll credits, right? That's not what happened.
What actually makes the show work is that it never punches down at the idea of Starfleet. The jokes are about bureaucracy, about how insane it would actually be to serve on a ship that gets attacked by god-like entities every six weeks and then everyone just... goes back to filling out reports. The humor comes from taking the premise more seriously than the shows that spawned it, not less.
Compare that to something like the TNG episode "Shades of Gray" — a clip show born out of a writers' strike, phoned in, forgettable. Lower Decks is made by people who clearly watched every single frame of TNG/DS9/VOY and loved it enough to know exactly which tropes to lovingly skewer (the away-team-red-shirt fake-out, the technobabble solves everything, the captain's log as narrative crutch) while still landing genuine "boldly go" moments that hit as hard as anything in the prime timeline.
The Boimler/Freeman relationship alone has more earned emotional payoff than most of Voyager's seven seasons of will-they-won't-they.
Anyway — bring on more Cerritos. Fight me in the comments.
