People didn’t travel as much back in those days. Visiting a foreign country or too might as well be like a trip to the moon.
But now, we basically live in the climax of the jet age, we can be anywhere in the world within 24 hours. And there’s so much of the world to see and stories to discover, not really worth the bother to imagine space travel to far off distant empty worlds, which will inevitably be used to further extend capitalism and just live the same lives we live here on Earth, just on a different world. The lack of any other interesting extraterrestrial civilizations to interact with makes it all pretty pointless. Going very far into space is mostly for exploration as a sport, like cave diving or something.
The people who are angry are the ones who had their cheese moved.