Star Wars films have been rudderless since 1994.
It has been reheated and reinvented twice for a new generation.
Original Trilogy: Nerd creates fun and innovative space films with friends and mostly unknown actors, lightning in a bottle
Prequel Trilogy: "Kids" movies about taxation and trade routes to sell toys and pioneer digital film making
Disney Trilogy: Banking on the IP with a JJ nostalgia reboot, turning it edgy, angst and woke with the Last Jedi and finally trying to conclude something that started as something entirely different
The strength of the original Star Wars, was that it was such a misfit to the era it was created in, it was something exciting and different even if objectively it wasn't even technically or from an acting point of view the best film at the time.
Lucas tried to replicate that with the prequels, but he couldn't because the stakes were way higher and in 1994 when he started writing TPM he couldn't count on the same adults that liked SW in the 80's to turn up and watch it.
He aimed it at a new generation trying to fit in the popular things at the time (digitization, comic relief, politics). If you look at the popular movies of the late 90's (Titanic, Babe, Toy Story, The Lion King etc.) you can see where he was coming from
and why with TPM, AotC and ROTS he was always one step behind chasing the market except with his technology.
It sorta reminds me of the final season of Game of Thrones.
GoT at that point had changed from an at the time daring fantasy series that was carried mostly by seasoned actors like Mark Addy, Charles Dance and Sean Bean
to a multi-season cross media behemoth that had lost its best characters/actors and source material halfway through the show. So they had to fall back on the only thing they had left Dragons and 'epic' battle scenes with fast action.
Likewise after 20 years, JJ had nothing left to fall back on but nostalgia. And even that nostalgia exists in at least 2 or 3 different forms at this point.
Unless he did something entirely different (and Johnson tried but couldn't pull that off within the Disney corporate constraints, so that was off the table) there was no way this would not end in a mediocre final product.