Not only zeitgeist. But portrayal in fiction requires heroism, action, and suspense. You don't get that with real warfare. Being shot at by an enemy you can't even see and then calling in an air strike at the location where you expect the enemy to be is not the "romantic vision" people have about war. They want close combat with sweaty men fighting each other in heroic ways.
What would be a more realistic portrayal? A bunch of automated drones fighting each other. Space even removes a lot of tactical elements. So the one who has the right number of good enough drones wins. That's boring. No heroism, no action, no drama, no suspense.
The sweat and suspense is left in non heroic and to outsiders a bit boring fashion at the engineer's drawing board.
This is one of the reasons I like Iain M Banks' space-fights, no matter the other flaws: yes, they're a bunch of drones fighting, but those drones are as entertaining characters as the flesh-and-blood passengers.
Add in no sound in space, no seeing lasers from the side, battles where you can't visibly see your enemy, ships going 'dead' without much visible going on - there's nowhere to 'sink' if you're catastrophically holed, and vehicular explosions really aren't that common despite what movies would have you believe. If you want 'action', there's not a lot of breadth in a realistic depiction of a space battle.
Ah yes. If you allow canonical, stereotypical battles then there's a high risk they could be boring. So you have to either figure out a way to portray them that aren't boring or you pick situations that are unusual to portray.
As a case in point, consider the way submarine combat is portrayed.
Submarines are a good point. But with submarines you have the whole hide&seek thing going. That's a lot of suspense right there. However in space there is no hide&seek. The problem is that space is so huge that unless you assume really fast spaceships there is no way of hiding. Planets and moons are too far apart to be really used as cover or tactical element.
Hide and Seek can work in space, even without magical cloaking technology. Space is very big, so if you're far enough away it may be difficult to tell a (properly designed) ship from random rocks or man-made debris unless you're looking dead at it already. Especially if you're flying in an area where lots of debris is already present, like an asteroid belt or a planet's ring. Doing it in near-earth orbit might be tricky, though, since people watch the sky a lot. Information from ground-based tracking stations could be used to identify large unknown orbiting objects.
What about the heat given off by the ship?
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect....
Quote: "If the spacecraft are torchships, their thrust power is several terawatts. This means the exhaust is so intense that it could be detected from Alpha Centauri. By a passive sensor."
True. However, the spacecraft would still be radiating heat for quite a while, as I suspect the primary method of heat dissipation would be radiation. I suppose the spacecraft could carry some form of coolant, and eject it once the engines are shut off, but then the spacecraft would need to eject it while it is very far away from the enemy craft lest the enemy detect the ejected hot coolant. But then the spacecraft could not alter its trajectory, and so it would have to rely on the enemy craft keeping a constant trajectory.
> Hide and Seek can work in space, even without magical cloaking technology
You put the high-power components of the ship at the focus of a very long and narrow paraboloid with a highly reflective interior and a special absorptive and selectively emitting exterior. The whole ship will be refrigerated, with the radiator at the focus of the paraboloid. Then, all you have to do is to aim your thermal emissions in a direction your enemy isn't -- which is easy to do if your enemy doesn't have stealth.
Hence, stealth will exist, but primarily as a deterrent to keep your opponent from using stealth with 100% confidence.
We currently have a lot of technology to spot objects in space. As cli already pointed out there is the heat signature of any ship. Combined with radar it should be easy to detect ships from far away. In open space there is (probably) also no stable debris you could use. Asteroid belts are actual nothing like in the movies. There is a much bigger distance between each asteroid in the belt. http://www.scienceadviser.net/2009/09/asteroid-belt-not-as-d...
Maybe the ring of a planet would work. But then the ship is at risk of being damaged by the ice and other things in the ring. And of course there are only few planetary rings compared to the rest of space.
What would be a more realistic portrayal? A bunch of automated drones fighting each other. Space even removes a lot of tactical elements. So the one who has the right number of good enough drones wins. That's boring. No heroism, no action, no drama, no suspense.
The sweat and suspense is left in non heroic and to outsiders a bit boring fashion at the engineer's drawing board.