I’d like to think that it is an unspoken rule among all spacefaring people, regardless of their planetary origin or biological design, to automatically reorient their ships to match the “up” direction of any other ship they are approaching.
It makes sense since (effectively) all spacefaring peoples started on a planet with gravity and well defined “up” directions. You wouldn’t interact with anyone in gravity while upside down, so as a courtesy you’d always want to be facing “up” for both your sake’s.
Technically, this only needs to be the practice of Starfleet (or even just human) navigators in order to account for 99% of what we see in Star Trek. Maybe it’s our guys who are doing all the careful orienting, and the alien of the week just comes in from whatever angle they want.
There’s probably thousand of pages written on diplomatic rules about which civilization’s ships have to re-orient themselves to meet another’s.
Or maybe, since Starfleet is seeing it all through the view screen rather than directly, it’s just a little image manipulation for the comfort of the viewer
I thought that it was canonical, at least in some series, that the viewscreen is a window that displays a 1x view of outside and any time they want to zoom in, or are hailed, if turns into a monitor? I swear there’s been multiple times where someone was sucked out of the bridge through it.
