People still joke about the carpets on starships (including in-universe in the recent shows), but honestly, you can pretty much measure how we've lost the optimistic future by tracking how Star Trek shows (including the post-2005 ones) got darker (literally, I'm talking about how the scenes were lit), the architecture less Hilton-like, and eventually, when carpets started to disappear.
Apropos visual media, there's another example of an optimistic vision of the future, which the article also indirectly mentions: Disney's Tomorrowland - not the fair, the 2015 movie. Severely underrated, that one. I broke down in tears when I watched it (okay, I was in a vulnerable period), because it was an unexpected breath of pure optimism about progress. I mean, the movie is literally about the very thing the article talks about - it recalls the optimism of yore, presents a protagonist who's asking herself and us, where did it all go wrong, and then tackles the question directly. The answer it gives may or may not be any good[0], but at least an attempt was made to talk about it. Sadly, this is the last attempt made so far in popular media, at least as far as I know.
I'm puzzled as to why these two stories were not mentioned. They're not exactly outliers no one has heard of.
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[0] - We're effectively fucking our own future up by only ever talking about disasters - past ones, current ones, and every plausible prediction of future ones - in a feedback loop with news and entertainment; we're simmering in despair, securing a doomed future by not being able to envision anything good as a society.
Yes, you could do that.
Or you could just cite "Alien" (and arguably "Dark Star" before it) as the key break with "the future is bright and shiny and comfortable", long before 2005.
Nah, dark or grim sci-fi were aplenty, many of them were just regular action movies (also popular then) but done in sci-fi setting.
I'm using Star Trek as a measuring stick, particularly TNG and later, because this was a very big, popular and long-running franchise, that happened to have baked in the idea of optimistic future for humanity as a core part of its setting. It's a measuring stick that spans almost six decades now, and you can see in it how sentiments changed over that time, and how the hope and optimism eroded.
Various dystopian shows and movies that appeared in that time, they were pessimistic by design, and thus work as spot measurements of what people thought would sell best at a particular time. Star Trek wasn't - the weight of an established franchise meant it could've kept selling optimism even as others would find it too financially risky; so Star Trek going darker measures a deeper change in the mindsets of writers and studio executives.