"History may not repeat, but it does rhyme."

• Ancient Klingon proverb

"Oh look, it's the AR wall" is the modern version of "oh look, it's the same octagonal set dressed up with random props from a couple of other episodes to represent an alien planet"

I sort of kept thinking this was kind of like a reverse Tuvix.

Identifying potentially unreliable narrators is such an underrated strategy! So a character says "The Federation has never encountered this race/phenomenon before." Off to Memory Alpha to state this as fact! But of course, people state beliefs as facts, incorrectly, all the time in real life!