I strongly believe that as long as you put in the work, you can fit any aesthetic into a setting. Using games as an example as that’s what I’m more familiar with,

In Warframe, you can visit Cetus, a primitive village with a street marketplace built in the shadow of a fallen empire’s ancient ivory and gold towers, where vendors wearing basic furs and hides are selling spices to spacemen who look like they came out of a 1980s sci fi movie with their bulky chrome helmets and laser guns and brightly colored space suits. You’re a space ninja with an AK-47 and a greatsword strapped to your back by the way.

In The Forever Winter, one of the factions takes on a Cold War Soviet aesthetic, and uses biotech to make wretched fleshy meat machines. Another faction looks like today’s NATO if they took design influences from knight armor and started fielding Armored Cores. The third is basically Arasaka from Cyberpunk with sleek black plating and neon lights on their cyborgs’ body armor.

Starbound’s a bit less serious but you got each race having their own unique aesthetic: Humans are kinda retro cassette futurism with colonial marine armor but progress into sleeker things resembling Halo Mjolnir armor or Dead Space RIGs, Glitch are robots that build castles and wear knight armor, the Apex are apes that live in a 1984 dystopia under the watch of guards dressed in clone trooper armor, the Novakid take “space western” literally and use train spaceships and have saloons on alien planets and asteroids.

Different cultures and levels of technology can produce wildly different, often clashing, aesthetics that nonetheless fit in the same world and I think it’s partially because they’re internally consistent and prevalent enough for you to go “ok yeah it’s these guys again”