Community's thing is that it is a meta show. It uses the meta it references to get a point across, make a joke, or provide a spectacle (a good example of spectacle are the Paintball episodes)
What OP referred to, and what I've noticed, was that media nowadays is just a mashup of what came before with little to say about it. Or to put it in other words: not transformative. The creator likes something, and they put it in their work because it's cool. There's nothing wrong with doing just that, but when you start seeing the same thing over and over again in different works, it gets tiresome.
We're so obsessed with filling every waking moment with something that we don't allow ourselves to have the "a-ha!" moment any more, so we default to "what if X and Y?" where X and Y are thoughts on the surface of our mind rather than two unrelated things that somehow click when the default mode network activates. For example: what do archways in a Shinto shrine have to do with a fox piloting a starship around? Absolutely nothing, and yet for Miyamoto that thought made sense.
For example "Remedial Chaos Theory" is where the term "The Darkest Timeline" comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedial_Chaos_Theory
To give an extreme example, just to make what I'm talking about obvious, this recent Instacart superbowl ad comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXGTaGjqERc
Nothing about the scene or anyone in it is really connected to any reality; the whole thing is like a second-level simulation of prior media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
The very brief (and bastardised) summary is that we're cutting ourselves from what is real, so we base our art on the fake reality that we're experiencing.
I'll never forget when one of my teachers asked: "who has seen a sheep?" The entire class put up their hand. The next question was "who has seen a live sheep, in front of them?" more than half the class put their hand down. We all know what a sheep looks like, but not because we've been near one.
It's funny that the part everyone quotes from the book (namely the Borges fable and the 'desert of the real itself') is in the introduction. Makes me wonder how many others didn't actually get through it. :)
"Yeah. This is a bottle episode."