In The Force Awakens we saw some Senators on balconies or something as they were getting nuked.
That is the one and only piece of evidence that a post-Empire world existed. And now it doesn’t exist, because they were nuked in TFA.
Otherwise it’s exactly as if the Empire never lost power. Perhaps an orderly off-screen transition of power from Palpatine to Snoke occurred in this universe.
It was a complete soft reboot. Somehow they’ve convinced fans to insist that the First Order is just a small little imperial remnant despite all evidence to the contrary.
My biggest issue with TFA is the whole First Order/Resistance thing.
Like… who are they resisting and why? Isn’t the Republic doing anything about these new imperials… why are the resistance hiding and doing stuff secretly when Leia should (probably) be in good stead with the new republic…
It just didn’t make sense and I had to switch off my brain and tell myself “ok, there’s the empire gain and the rebels again and just deal with it”.
I think it just wasn’t developed enough in TFA. The idea was, that the New Republic were appeasing the FO hoping to prevent a new all out open war, but were funding the Resistance in secret, who openly opposed the rising power of the FO. The New Republic sort of resembled Neville Chamberlain, who tried to appease Hitler by giving into his demands in hopes of preventing a second World War. This all failed of course, and as shown in TFA the FO uses the New Republic’s relationship to the Resistance as a pretense for war, destroying the Republic capital.
RJ ignores all this, and uses the opportunity to take the New Republic out of the equation, and rebrands the Resistance rebels. Leia is no longer General Leia, but the Princess again. So, we’re completely back to a small band of rebels who need to restore the Republic (again) by overthrowing the Empire 2.0 controlling the entire galaxy, only this time what took the Empire decades with a process, that ended in the Imperial Senate being disbanded, now happens in a matter of days. The ST thus plays like a highly compressed version of the OT with some twists and shocks thrown in the mix.