He's got a point, but for many or most people, science fiction meant Buck Rogers or Superman or Edgar Rice Burrough's Martian novels or Percival Lowell's Martian canals. Even Verne and Wells existed in the popular mind as adventure stories rather than speculation about ideas and scientific possibilities.
Are the many films based on Philip K. Dick's books worse because of Star Wars? Would they have been better if Lucas (and Spielberg who also played a role in what the author considers the debasement of the genre) had never lived?
And was the old SF -- for all its laudable involvement with serious ideas -- maybe a little ham-handed in its treatment? Always the too obvious lesson from many practitioners?
Star Wars got Hollywood excited about SciFi again, but they’re dumb, exceedingly well-paid, bureaucrats. It’s foolish to expect too much from them.