Isn’t it a little weird how in the first movie, Han says that he’s never heard of the Jedi or the Force, but the Jedi only went extinct twenty years earlier?
He just said he didn’t believe in this stuff. This is also consistent with what he said in TFA.
LUKE
You don’t believe in the Force, do you?HAN
Kid, I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other. I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff, but I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s one all-powerful force controlling everything. There’s no mystical energy field that controls my destiny. It’s all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
In any case, I think Lucas originally wanted the Jedi to be extinct for much more years for the original movie, but this later changed with the next two.