I really don’t get people’s beef with Leia using the force. In Jedi, Luke tells her the Force is strong in her family and says “in time you will learn to use this power too”. 30 years have passed! While Leia seems to have been mostly busy with politics during that time, she has to have received SOME instruction from Luke. Granted, she’s no Jedi per se, but she can do some levitation and communication.

Remember, in a vacuum, you don’t have any air resistence or gravity to slow you down, so Leia would have only needed to exert just a little bit of Force pull for a short amount of time to bring her back to the ship. Plus people can survive in the vacuum of Space unprotected for a few moments.