What a ridiculous article, full of generalizations and speculation not backed up by anything but the author's own wishes.

We don't know whether TROS suffered financially because of TLJ fans who didn't go see it, because of TLJ haters who walked away from the franchise, or some combo of both.

Unfortunately, a segment of those who disliked TLJ were blatantly sexist in their critiques, and thus ANYBODY who disliked the film for any reason got lumped in with them. Just a sign of the times we live in, where if you don't tow the progessive line 100% or made a problematic statement decades ago, you are persona non grate.

My favorite bit in the article is when she points out how some of the female characters feats in TLJ are portrayed by TROS to have been the result of luck or the assistance of men. I assume she is referring to stuff like Holdo maneuver, Leia's force pull in space, and Rey's overall force skills. So let's address those in order:

1) If flying a ship into another at hyperspeed was a viable option, wouldn't it be happening all the time, especially with kamikaze imperial pilots? It makes sense that it would be something unlikely to work in most circumstances, otherwise space battles would be completely different.

2) Leia being trained by Luke made sense and also gave her a role in TROS in helping Rey hone her skills. Otherwise Leia goes right from being force sensitive to having pretty major skills out of the blue.. and if she had those skills from jump, why wouldn't she have used them in ROTJ? And i think this is JJ making lemonade, since he didn't show Leia having any adeptness in the force in TFA aside from her ability to sense the feelings of those closest to her from afar.

3) Rey's instant skill with the force was questioned by many even in TFA. Making her Palpatine's heir explains why she is able to accomplish major force feats as quickly as she does, with so little training.

I won't even get into how TLJ largely sidelined the black and hispanic lead characters, having them accomplish nothing except learn some lessons, afterschool-special style.

I will say Rose should've gotten more to do in TROS, there were numerous instances were someone with engineering/technical expertise could have been handy. I'll take JJ at his word that she was meant for more scenes with Leia but they didn't like the final results.

That rant completed, i actually don't hate TLJ, its OK but doesn't work well as part 2 of a trilogy (and less so as part 8 of 9).... i definitely liked TFA and TROS better, and felt TROS suffered from basically having to introduce a new Big Bad at the last minute and having to make up for lost time by giving the main trio a bunch of adventures together. TROS would have been better if had split into two parts, to give the audience more time to process things and to give the characters more space to breathe. Basically the pace was too frantic for too much of the movie because they were trying to squeeze so much in. While TLJ was OK, Rian basically handed JJ some lemons and JJ did the best he could, imo.