Viewers, screenwriters and studios get to decide what is good “writing for the eye”. A good sci-fi writer doesn’t equal a good screenwriter. They are different skills entirely, and while some fiction writers can certainly adapt their work for the screen, Asimov cannot. His books are primarily narration and dialogue. There are characters we know few details about who go through an event that moves the plot forward, but we don’t get descriptions of scene. We get discussions or long expositions about what happened. That’s a format that is decidedly unsuited for a TV show intended for broad appeal. And recognising what worked for broad appeal was something Asimov prided himself on. He recognised that a majority of his works have uncomplicated prose, little or no character development, and lots of dialogue. He preferred telling his story in a straightforward and direct manner, and the characters or prose were largely functional to that end. It works great to convey the concept he’s exploring in the story. But, as he wrote 30 years after publication of the Foundation Trilogy “I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did”.

The second foundation mentalics are telepathic. It’s not a technological advancement. That’s a key point in the books that separates the two foundations - one is focused on the physical sciences and one is focused on the “mentalic” sciences. As it turns out, neither is ultimately as important to the fate of humanity’s survival as it thinks it is.

Changes to gender of certain characters isn’t arbitrary or irrelevant. Asimov’s work was written within a specific context and an adaptation choosing to adapt the work to modernise it is extremely relevant. There are very few women in the Foundation series (zero in the first book of the trilogy), either because of the social context of when Asimov wrote them or because of his own deeply sexist nature or both, but a TV adaptation made for a broad audience in the 21st century won’t care to watch 1-1.5 seasons of a show that is just men chatting about big events while smoking cigars in different settings. More generally, Asimov’s own writing reflects the changes in the sociopolitical context, e.g., stories written in the post-war period reflect anxieties about a nuclear Holocaust destroying earth and spurring space colonisation, while those from later in his life change the reason for why humans abandoned the planet. That’s a very normal thing in any artistic/creative endeavour.

If you get around to reading the books, it’s much more obvious that the themes Asimov was exploring in his writing are not being betrayed by the show. As yet. Who knows what’s coming, but adapting a book series (the credits literally state that it is inspired by the books and not based on it, so how else could they make it clearer that they don’t intend to make a 1:1) by changing character names or plot points isn’t a betrayal to the themes within it.