I actually tended to dislike the holodeck episodes, because it always seemed to boil down to some variation of “the holodeck is {malfunction} and the ship will {bad thing} because {technobabble}, unless we go in and manually turn it off. But oh no, {malfunction} means the holodeck controls are disabled and the safeties are turned off!”

I know they were struggling for human plots in the deep of space, and the holodeck was usually their way to have humans surrounded by other humans in places that weren’t distinctly alien. But that meant a lot of the holodeck plots usually needed some sort of broader impetus to get the crew to engage with it. Because the stakes are low if the holodeck is working properly and the safeties are enabled; Whenever things get tense, the crew can just pause the simulation and exit the holodeck. So lots of the holodeck episodes ended up putting a proverbial gun to the crew’s heads with “shit’s broke, and it’ll do bad things to the ship if you just refuse to enter the deck. Now go pretend to be {period character} for the plot!”