The last time I paid money to go to a Star Trek fan event was Destination Star Trek in London in 2021. Most of the Discovery cast were there promoting season 4. The big screens in the halls for talks even had the season 4 trailer airing, prominently announcing the airing date. The first episode was due less than a week after DST and they were really building up the hype.
Two days after the convention, they announced they were pulling Discovery from Netflix and solely airing season 4 on their shitty in-house streaming service, whose launch date in the UK was still 'tbc'.
Then the mods on r/startrek decided not to enforce spoiler protections for season 4 after it aired in the US, so I got spoiled for the general plot over the course of the next few months. My enthusiasm to watch it dwindled to the extent that, even now that Paramount+ is available here, I still haven't made it more than a few episodes in.
I agree. I'm not quite sure how it's kosher. I can speculate but do not know. For example, maybe some of this stuff was pre-recorded? Just one possible wild guess.
John Hodgman talked about it in his podcast. He cannot promote any of the TV projects he's worked on because of the strike even though he'd like to, but he is allowed to promote and do stuff for Maximum Fun because it's an artist co-op which is totally separate from the strike/contract.
I don’t know the strike rules, but with the WGA possibly still being on strike, and SAG possibly going out on strike, during Comic-Con I’m imagining the panels to consist of non-union background actors who never had speaking roles and aren’t in the WGA. Some mild dishing about behind the scenes.