I would argue that we have much more original content today than ever before and so it's far more difficult to actually make anything truly groundbreaking. The narrative landscape today is far more complex, diverse, and refined than from even the early 2000s, let alone anything prior.
I mean the 2022 one. The 1984 one has not aged well. I'm quite the fan of the 2000 tv mini-series one though.
Maybe it will rise to the levels of great sci-fi, maybe it will not, I won't judge it till I can see the complete picture. It has the correct aesthetic and the truly shiver-worthy moments are yet to come.
I'd say the exact opposite. The 2022 version - it's nice; I could fault it here or there, but it has a lot of going for it. But... it only goes so far. It doesn't reach the dramatic heights of Lynch's creation, and the mystique of the design.
(Of course one should try and watch one of the longer cuts with more of the dialog and establishing scenes.)
IMO the 2000 mini-series had great acting and actually followed the books (a rarity in today's book to TV conversions) but the low budget really killed it. Many of the desert shots were painful to watch and the sets had a very cheap vibe to them.
The desert shots were shot with a technique called translights.
You're right that they couldn't afford to shoot on-location for the desert scenes so instead they painted desert landscapes and scaled them up then printed them on 40-foot-high by 200-foot-wide transparencies and put bright lights behind them to illuminate the scenes.
They don't look anything like real life but they weren't really trying for realism as much as they were trying for artistry.
I think that when you view things through that lens, what they did craft was beautiful.
What good recent scifi comes close? Dune? Bladerunner 2049?