The kind of technology that’s being used in these episodes is not the usual kind for this show, that is science-fiction for us, but common and mundane or cutting-edge but at least believable and publicly known to the people who are using and abusing it.
It’s a kind of technology that doesn’t really seem to be a thing in the world depicted in these episodes. Apparently not something any of the other characters would even assume to be possible, and certainly shouldn’t be feasible for just one deranged individual to put together in their garage and then secretly use it to live out their torture or revenge fantasies.
But still they do.
So where does the U.S.S. Callister guy get a device that can just create a fully-sentient digital copy of a person, complete with memories and everything, from a single DNA sample?
How can a woman, who was just your usual weird computer geek in highschool, simply build some reality-shifting quantum-whatever in her basement all on her own, that can make her ruler of the universe, in a world that has otherwise ordinary 21st century technology?
I’m not questioning the technology itself or how it works – as, again, of course it’s science-fiction – but how it fits into the kind of world it is being depicted in.
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The concept that a single extremely gifted person can develop a major breakthrough (teleportation, time machine) all by themselves is not that unusual – it may be less and less realistic as technology becomes more and more complex, but it’s not impossible.
People still believe that cold fusion in a glass of water could be possible (IOW something you could cook up in your basement).
So maybe your examples are also something that isn’t that far away, it just takes one person to stumble upon it by accident.
As for the scenario where people know it’s possible, well, possible but highly illegal is also a thing. You can cook meth in your kitchen, doesn’t mean people will assume their colleague does it.
The idea of fully sentient copies was established as far back as White Christmas. Shit, you could even argue that the android in Be Right Back was fully sentient. The technology for sentient constructs didn’t come out of nowhere. And the rest of it is just a computerised simulation, the kind that we’ve seen since the second episode. It all adds up.