Watched the first two episodes of 'Lower Decks'.
You're supposed to 'rock out' with the death metal loving 'black female lead', while laughing at the danger-hair beta male. The subtext is so obviously woke that I fail to see why some of you tried to give this a pass. Perhaps it will get better later on, but you'll have to suffer through all the 'I got this' college/social media female humor throughout.
The Joss Whedon quippy writing, the uber-competent females, the obnoxious black female captain, the obnoxious black female lead, and the less than impressive male side characters.
This show is also part of the hostile take over of the Star Trek franchise by left-liberal feminist writers.
Some episodes were actually pretty funny and these were usually the ones that acknowledged that Mariner is a complete piece of shit who has no purpose being in starfleet as she's a dumb character who frequently self sabotages for no good reason yet the narrative goes out of its way to help her (including manifesting a federation starship for her to steal in one of the finales despite that faction explicitly not stealing federation vessels). Highlights include Mariner being given the only fair holosimulation assessment and failing because she legitimately sucks (the funniest part is this was in season 1 so perhaps the writers were aware of how much of a mary sue she is) or being reduced to a literal knife magnet because she literally contributed nothing otherwise.
There seems to be a lot of confusion on what the writers were planning to do with Mariner and if you haven't inferred from the first paragraph of how inconsistent she is in all aspects of her character other than annoying; the fact that she ends up trying to be rick from rick and morty during episode 1 only for stuff like that to never ever happen again should demonstrate how no one seems to know what she was about. They don't even really do a job of explaining why she is constantly self-sabotaging herself. The best answer given was that she was sad because a minor character in DS9 died on spy mission so this made her anxious about actually doing a good job in the federation because she would be promoted beyond her competence and killed but this is hypocritical because she is basically letting everyone else get promoted and die in her place and its implied she is competent enough to reach high ranks without issue.
It is important to note that season 1 went quite heavy on the woke which mostly went away in later seasons especially as the writers seemed to notice that mariner is a shitty character that is easily the worst character on the show. They still had huge fuck ups (like trying to state that multiverse must be cool because we get to explore the sexuality of existing IP characters... whoops) and the show absolutely cannot do drama or high stakes correctly and often makes huge shortcuts or dramatic failures out of plot necessity rather than comedy (i.e Mariner steals a federation ship that the rebel faction which wasn't stealing federation ships shouldn't even have).
One thing I do have to disagree with OP on is that the show doesn't really do a good job hyping up female leads. There are definitely more episodes where the female leads are only ones doing anything but there are plenty of episodes where the male leads especially Ransom and head of security are all shown to be very competent and at times basically infallible at the job with Ransom's only failings typically consisting of having to baby Mariner or make excuses so she doesn't immediately get fired like she deserves. They also don't feminize the male Klingons IIRC and treat the male Klingon Captain as generally capable.
TL:DR If you were hoping this long ass text would help you figure out if you want to watch lower decks or not... I can't really help with that. I watched the show with my brother as a family activity that he wanted to do and the show when it wasn't doing stereotypical woke shit was actually being funny (it does fail massively at drama). I just wrote this mostly to point out that Mariner is the worst freaking character in existence in the franchise potentially even toppling Wesley Crusher because at least the writers had an idea what they were doing with Wesley Crusher. If you really need to know if you should watch maybe just search funniest clips or read the episode synopsis and pick the episode that don't sound like shit. If those don't work then don't watch. You're not missing much especially since Mariner is a train wreck.