It's true that Star Trek is just a story. OTOH, a machine that cheaply and quickly assembles feedstock into pre-programmed patterns is not physically impossible like warp drive -- it's just something we can't yet make. 3d printers are a crude preview. 19th-century people could have tried to forecast the consequences of Babbage's idea of a computer. It wouldn't have been a ridiculous thing to try: they had electricity and classical economics.

OTOH I wouldn't expect a look at a world with 'replicators' to look much like Star Trek, in the same way Robin Hanson's The Age of Em reads differently from Altered Carbon.