I was with your argument until you brought in the Ewoks and the Na'vi. Both of which WON against enemies with high-tech technology.
And how did they do it? By using their home to their advantage. That goblin with an axe definitely won't be much threat to a guy with a laser rifle. But five goblins that the guy with the gun doesn't see? Now that's a fight.
Remember, combat and the world don't live in a flat chamber. There are plenty of things that lower-tech and "weaker" enemies can do to even the playing field. Traps, ambushes, stealing or destroying supplies, etc. Treat your weaker NPC enemies like *they* are the ones in the Survival Horror game with the PCs as the BBEG.
Having an advantage against your opponent like this isn't exclusive to welding high tech weaponry, as it can be as simple as having the high ground. You could've referenced other movies with this same scenario without access to advanced weapons, like Conan the Barbarian.
Awarding XP in this instance is really a case by case basis. Do you want to award them with XP because you put them in the position to run over hordes of zombies with a truck? Do you want to give them XP for surviving the odds until they found a higher level weapon?
In any case, your party should be appropriately leveled for your campaign in mind, in whatever way you see fit.
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Why would you want to have a totally universal game system? Nearly always you can make each individual campaign better by picking a rule set that closely supports the particular kind of game you want to play.
IIRC, Eclipse Phase for example doesn't give XP for killing monsters, but it does give it for succeeding at missions.
An easy fix if you're worried about this is to just no longer do XP; just level people up after about three adventures or so.
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I completely agree with Ascalaphus. XP, to me, is an archaic way to play rpgs. It is a holdover system from back when the GM was an adversary and the game had just branched off from being a tactical mini system. In those old systems you would get XP from killing random people and not get XP for avoiding a fight with ingenuity.
If you are dedicated to XP, my suggestion is to look to systems like Dungeon World. Their XP is rewarded from failing checks and actually playing your character as a person (playing to the background you've created).
As a GM it also is okay every now and then for the players to be those bad arses. I loooove RP and playing a character. But, every so often, I quite enjoy feeling powerful. There is not a template, recipe, or cookie cutter answer to you overarching question. Being a GM is hard and complicated, which is why I stay away from it as much as possible.
I second (or third) the opinion that XP is outdated. I don't like to use it and instead use milestone leveling.
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Starfinder isn't trying to be a universal rpg....
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Before this thread derails to complaining about exp, I have to say that Paizo both rewards xp for avoiding fights and that I prefer xp to milestone leveling for purpose of tracking how many encounters there are per level :p Which is granted much easier in 2e than in 1e or starfinder because 2e's xp system makes it much easier to comprehend composition of encounters per level.
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How should be the XPs reward when high-tech allow a easier or harder fight? What if you can drive a heavy truck to run over a horde of zombies. A goblin with an axe and a shield is cannon fodder but that monster with the same stats but with a sniper rifle from the top of a tree, or a window in a building can be too dangerous for PCs without ranged attacks.
If you look at actual Starfinder adventures, you notice that high tech just about makes it doable to fight on-level enemies, it's the baseline. If you had to do it with medieval weaponry that would actually make the encounters harder than normal.
However, sometimes (quite rarely) you can deploy ship weapons against what was scripted as a regular combat encounter. One time we figured out where the monster's lair was and we only wanted it dead, from a safe distance. We didn't expect it to have any important loot or information. So we nuked the entire lair from orbit.
Now how do you do that with XP? Well, if it's a rare thing, don't sweat it, just give XP. But you can also take a step back and wonder "why am I giving XP for killing monsters anyway?"
White Wolf, Shadowrun, Eclipse Phase all give more XP for achieving story objectives or character growth and just some points if "there was danger", without caring about how many enemies specifically you confronted. So it really isn't a universal law that you have to do XP for combats.
Milestone leveling is a popular alternative. Adventure Paths tend to have an entry in the beginning saying "the PCs should be level X before they enter Y", and as a GM instead of tracking XP you can just tell people they level to X when they get to Y.
Because with milestones your level progression isn't based on monsters fought but on how far you get in the story, it encourages players to play differently. There's no use in grinding dumb monsters without treasure, it's okay to evade tough risky fights if you don't actually need that particular creature dead. So scouting and sneaking become more important tactics.
This is a good example of how "universal" systems really aren't that universal. If your game rules say you must kill monsters to progress, players have a reason to hunt down every stupid mook in every room. If your rules say characters advance by achieving story goals, players will focus on those. And if your rules say characters grow if they have personal growth/RP moments, combat becomes even less important to the game.
So depending on the kind of game you want, pick an XP/leveling system that encourages the desired playstyle.
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In the old, old days of D&D 1E, you got 1 XP per gold piece you obtained, so the real way to power was to just steal everything you come across and sell it at the market.
Classy.
Starfinder is balanced on the assumption that players have equipment roughly equivalent to their level. You can give players much higher level equipment, but their "effective level" is going to be very difficult or impossible to estimate.
So a group of unarmed level 5 PCs will have a somewhat nebulous effective level lower than expected. A group of level 5 PCs with a bunch of level 10 items will have a nebulous higher effective level.
Play will be drastically different between the two, as somewhat described in the OP. Against level 5 threats, the overgeared party will hit about as often as expected, but deal outsized damage. They'll also be much harder to hit, with their better armor.
If you want to approximate these scenarios with XP, my first guess would be to grant XP as normal to the group without gear, and use the average item level of their gear as their effective level when determining XP rewards when they get super-geared.
As others have said, milestone leveling would be a much easier way to go about it.
As an aside: I like XP for open world, sandbox games. When there's no real story to track, or they can go where they like, it's very difficult to arbitrarily decide when they should level. For Starfinder, I find sandbox games harder to run, so I've been exclusively using milestone leveling so far.