the issue is... people fought and made sacrifices for a better tomorrow .. to defeat evil..
yes, life goes on. But where was the pay off for the original sacrifices? The emperor was killed... the assumption was the rebels WON... peace would be restored ... the sacrifices made, worth it..
But this series starts off as if the war was never won... peace was never restored... the good guys never got back in control, ect. It just picks up as if none of the conclusions from the previous series even happened. Then systematically kills off every one we love and replaces with them a bunch of people we really don’t care that much about.
They should have just jumped further into the future if they wanted to start with new actors. After a 100 years of peace or whatever... evil rises again or some such. Heck they could have even kept Luke alive that long, since yoda was 100’s of years old, due to the force.
The Rebels did win. But it’s a big galaxy. George talked about it some when he was still planning on making the next trilogy, and then it slid into the books when he gave them the bible. The Empire was an efficiency machine, lots of bureaucrats, lots of people doing their job, the Emperor just defined their job some. Hitchcock used to joke that a movie would get made just fine without a director because everybody on set knows what they’re doing, all the director does is make sure questions get answered with a single vision. That’s kind of the Empire, Emperor dies, but all the folks who do stuff still know what they’re doing, they just don’t have the single vision.
Peace was restored for a while, there’s a 30 year gap in there, but eventually problems will come up. Again that’s how life works, WWI set the pieces for WWII, which gave us the Cold War, which immanentized the War on Terror.
Jumping further would have been good, but you still wind up with a lot of the same stuff. One way or the other bad guys must rear their head and threaten the galaxy, otherwise you don’t have a story to tell. That’s epilogues, no matter how far they jump forward the first thing they have to do is undo the win. 30 years, 100 years, 1000 years, step one for the story to continue is “turns out that win wasn’t so awesome”.