Where was it said non Jedi ever used sabers?
Han beat a dead Tauntaun with one, and considered slicing up a net with one (which is really all your average person could accomplish today with a cutlass). And if you’re including the ST, Finn actually fought with one.
Historically speaking as opposed to carrying another type of laser weapon. If laser swords are all the galaxy had as hand weaponry “for a thousand generations”, then technological development in the Star Wars universe took a very strange path.
The Jedi are supposed to be like Samurai. They probably had swords with physical blades early in their history.
I’d always pictured the Jedi as kinda like engineers who still use sliderules. There is no doubt that sliderules are cool (in an engineering sense). There is no doubt that they can be used to solve a surprisingly wide array of today’s problems quickly and efficiently in the hands of someone who knows how to use them–skilled sliderule users easily besting casual calculator users both in speed and accuracy. But they are still ultimately a technological dead end (somehow I predict this will be my most controversial statement; some people really love their sliderules).
So Obi-Wan and Luke use sliderules after everyone has calculators, computers, and smartphones. The Jedi who defended the Republic for a thousand years did so with sliderules, even though the Republic also had calculators, computers, and maybe even smartphones. I didn’t take the thousand years statement to mean the progress of technology was slow, but that the Jedi had been around, presumably with with their idiosyncratic tech, for quite a while. And they’re proud of it. It’s possible there was a time before blasters when lightsabers were standard issue weapons for everyone. It’s also possible lightsabers were a custom-created ego project by some Jedi who really liked swords, and they were never actually top-tier weaponry. But that’s going back before there are any references I’d care to use.