Of course, that's why all of these genre clichés build up - because in a stereotypical Fantasyland that readers will be familiar with, you can write your character drama.
For example, take (the excellent) "The Expanse". Does the existence of that story mean that all near-future, in-solar-system, politically complex SF is done now? No, of course not! It's like saying that the Beatles "Hear Comes the Sun" was written in D, so now no-one can write in that key anymore.
My point is, even if all you see SF as is a vector for new ideas, there's still infinite (well, combinatorial explostion) variation in how that idea plays out. To take one last example: is "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" the last word in the SF meteor-gonna-kill-Earth sub-genre? Heck no! What if there's a robot civilization rooting around in the asteroid belt for resources, and it becomes aware of the threat first, and has to figure out a way to avert the threat (and a sub-faction doesn't want to avert it)? What if you focused on "preppers" on Earth who want to make a sustainable human colony underground?
I'm just sayin', even if you're idea driven and not character driven, literally every idea could stand to be treated again.
I would say most of the better scifi is about people or society, and not the framing used. Interstellar isn't actually about space travel, the left hand of darkness isn't actually about intergalactic diplomacy, etc.
Oops, I meant Star Trek!
Some stories are. But others, especially SF, are about ideas, not people. There is really no point in setting your story in the future, or in space, or whatever if you are just going to write about people. You can set them in the here and now like most literary fiction does.