I feel like I've gone through a real arc on that excuse. When I was a kid, I was uptight about stuff that made no sense or wasn't "realistic" (sigh, I was a kid), then I let it go for years and years as I got a bit older, but honestly, all the evidence I saw was that, aside from really wacky fantasy stuff, stories which were lackdaisical or half-arsed about that tended to be worse stories in various ways (often also not taking care with the characters), and often it was just totally unnecessary, so since my late 20s, I'm not mad like I was as a kid, but I do frown at it, because most of it is so trivial to avoid.
I totally appreciate that it's something where perfect is the enemy of good, and where you could spend hundreds of hours trying to identify every little inconsistency and failure at verisimilitude (which is more important than strict realism or "science fact" - internal consistency), but it takes very little time to ensure stuff basically makes sense.
I know there are some people who don't and never will care whether stuff makes sense. That's fine, I'm not one of them, and most of the people I play with aren't either. Just a basic effort to ensure things make basic sense, even if they don't stand up to in-depth analysis, that's all I really want at this point.
As an example, I might offer up the various Stargate series. These were generally very trope-y, not very well-written shows, and I might have just ignored them - but they really had two aces which rendered them watchable - a surprisingly charismatic cast, and a science advisor attached to the productions by the USAF (I think he eventually came to work for them directly). This one dude caused so much stuff in Stargate to make more sense that it palpably increased the quality of the show for me - and yeah you have to accept some fantastic science, like the Stargates themselves - but he helped them keep even the fantastic stuff internally consistent, and the same from week to week (not perfectly but better than 95% of SF). Stargate Universe I'll never forget a couple of the episodes because they actually played with this in the way some murder-mysteries do, by giving all the clues about a situation to the viewer, and allowing the viewer's grasp on actual science to allow them to guess what was really going on before the characters did. That's very rare and very fun as a viewer.
And if you keep things internally consistent and making basic sense in your game, you can give that ability to your players too, and if they're the kind of people who enjoy it (and a lot of players I know are), that's really cool - that's another way you actively the make the game fun and rewarding which layers on top of all the other ways.
(All this said, in SF it can backfire if the writers don't actually know enough science - in that case I say ELIDE THE HELL OUT OF IT - just obfuscate it! Don't try to explain it! We'll work out explanations in our head! That can work too - but it can be overused. I'd put the beloved Becky Chambers in this category, sadly - she could use more elision and less explaining because sometimes she really isn't nailing the science to the point where it's severely distracting - where Mary Robinette Kowal is the opposite, because she consistently nails the science. This last is just an observation re: SF and not generally relevant to D&D.)
