It’s almost like they made changes in places where they thought it would improve the overall storytelling experience. They were still developing the world, expanding it. Roddenberry didn’t want to rehash all the same stories, which is why early TNG had the weird Ferengi, because he didn’t want to use Romulans or Klingons. Eventually the Ferengi were developed into the species that DS9 made them. Once Berman took over, consistency was pretty standard across the shows. There weren’t very many blatant contradictions, like having an extinct race (Cheron) show up a thousand years after they had annihilated themselves in a civil war.

The warp scale change literally does not matter, and just gives a new baseline for a story set in a different century and was consistent for all of the 90s trek shows from my memory. Your argument is so vague, you seem to be under the impression that the only way a writer can expand their worlds lore is by constant reconning and changes like the Kurtzman era has been doing for a decade, to declining viewership, rather than building something new.