TL;DR
That being said, while I admit Disney SW has its ups and downs, it’s no more than the old EU (Legends). Are the sequels more chaotic than they should have been? Yes, that’s what you get for not having a plan ahead of time on how to do all that. But I still don’t see how that makes everything Shawn and his ilk said valid. News flash, the blatantly far-right fascist Empire was portrayed as bad even in the holy original trilogy!
I have pages worth of rants I could write concering the toxicity of the SW fandom these days, and how they caused more damage than Disney ever could, but I’ll just adress one fallacy.
Didn’t they already retcon that the empire was founded by a woman who was totally better than Palpatine?
Yeah, I heard about that. And pretty sure that’s a misconception bordering on outright lies. That character merely was convinced she was the mastermind behind the Empire (as so many imperials tend to do), but eventually was easily outgambitted by Palpatine and killed once he had enough of it. I just found that out by reading a few minutes on Wookieepedia about the character in question: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Pitina_Mar-Mas_Voor.
Besides, it’s not like Palpatine ever really cared about running the Empire, in any medium. He just wanted to be at the top while everyone else suffered, he was evil like that.
the media is constantly demonizing people who even dare to criticize last Jedi
Says the side of the argument who harassed everyone involved with that film because it dared NOT to cater to your (dumb) expectations. TLJ is probably objectively the BEST of the sequel trilogy! But even to this day people are still insulting and harassing Rian Johnson, even after he has moved on and made such a great film like Knives Out!