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The best fiction accurately reflects the world in most ways, in order to explore the implications of deliberately changing the fictional world in one or a few ways. If you don't want to make any changes, just write a history or a biography, and it'll be more useful. If you want to make an unlimited set of changes, that might be aesthetically evocative but it's not going to be interesting - at some point your attempts to create a world primarily from your own mind only tell me about your mind, not about any worlds.
Looking at "Aliens, Terminator 2, Buffy, Xena, ... the various Star Treks, The Matrix, ..." (I never watched Dark Angel, nor enough Farscape to comment), most of them actually came off pretty well in this sense? In rough order from best to worst (by this criterion; I still love DS9!):
Aliens had Vasquez get pretty buff, but it doesn't save her any more than it does the buff male marines who outnumber her. Newt is a survivor because she was the best at running and hiding; Ripley is buff enough (in part due to the Alien backstory) that it's important to the story, but the importance is "she can carry that huge gun/flamethrower", not "she could overpower a man". She's capable of as much courage as the men, but she doesn't let that drive her into extreme risks until maternal "must save Newt" instinct forces it on her.
Terminator 2 relies even more heavily on backstory here. Out of context, "the woman is the super tough super buff one" seems like pure proto-Woke, but the backstory is that this is the same woman who was a fragile damsel-in-distress who barely survived the previous movie, was turned into an utterly driven person for a decade and a half by her experiences there, and hasn't had anything to do during that time except plot and scheme and exercise in a mental hospital. That "experience creating strength" character arc isn't denied to the males; Miles Dyson and John Connor don't have time to get buff, but they both gain emotional fortitude very quickly.
In The Matrix, "the girl is one of the super tough super buff ones" is a natural consequence of the deliberate changes, no weirder than the same situation for Keanu, who at this point is closer to gangly "Bill and Ted" Keanu than to "training with Taran Butler for John Wick" Keanu. Their avatars have super powers when they're in the
video gamesimulation.In Buffy, "the girl is the super tough super buff one" is the deliberate change, specifically justified in-story by ancient magic. There's a wide variation in physical skill among the non-magically-powered girls and women, but they generally don't fare as well.
In Xena, "the woman is the super tough super buff one" is pretty much only justified by "she's exceptional", unless there was more to the story I've forgotten? But IIRC "exceptional women are physically competitive with exceptional men" was just played straight here.
In the 90s Star Treks, there wasn't a ton of physical combat, but when there was they generally played the gender differences straight too. Perhaps the most common example was Major Kira fighting, and while I can definitely believe that a trained and experienced guerrilla can disarm a random idiot with a hand weapon in close quarters, by the time they get to "mostly holding her own while surrounded by three Klingon warriors" it's clear that plot armor knows no gender.
Ah that is because she uses the most powerful technique known to any race. The double fist punch. She uses it like 15 times in that 1 minute clip.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Double-fist_punch
That's a fascinating rabbit hole to go down: How the ‘Star Trek’ Punch Became the Worst Fight Move on TV.
In hindsight I also love the fact that, out of all the unrealistic sci-fi show things that nerds loved to geek out about, I never saw Star Trek fight choreography come up. Do the fleet sizes in Star Wars make tactical and economic sense? Oh, we can rant and debate about that for hours. Is the apparent motion of stars while the Enterprise is at warp consistent with the canon speeds the ship is at? Of course not, but here's a fan theory explaining why. Now, is clasping your fists together to punch with both at once a great fight move? What, why would you even ask a question about fisticuffs instead of something we know more about like teleporters??
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I also often favour movies where all the 'differences from reality' appear to flow from the concept of the movie itself. The more additional arbitrary tropes the movie includes the worse it can be. A schlocky Marvel movie has rules in addition to 'superheroes exist' such as 'there is no such thing as sex' and 'people banter a lot in dangerous situations' and indeed 'all women (and men) can fight really well'. There are reasons for these rules but they're mainly to do with appealing to a mass audience rather than artmaking. And genre movies basically are clusters of rules that are imposed in addition to a movie's guiding concept. (At least in good genre movies the makers understand the reason the rules have evolved, and use them for an overarching purpose however).
But all that said, this is about good art vs bad art, and if you try to do your learning about the world just based on bad art, it might not be too surprising if you don't learn too much.
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