As soon as the gliders start their attack, the planet isn’t entirely white anymore, the red dust makes it look completely different from Hoth, so your problem is basically that there are AT-ATs in the movie.
Sounds like denial to me…
One of the Rebel soldiers as he lines up in the trench, literally picks up some of the white stuff in front of the camera and says “it’s salt”. This is a wink at the audience from RJ that he knows what we are thinking and he acknowledges that he is essentially retreading the battle of Hoth to an extent. The landscape is white (salt instead of snow and ice), there’s a Rebel base built into cliff face tunnels (instead of tunnels into the ice and mountain side), it’s protected by a massive armoured door (instead of an energy shield) which the FO / Empire renewed have to destroy in order to enter the base. All the Rebel troops jump into trenches and even the way it shows them lining up to lean against the trench wall and sighting their weapons down range is reminiscent of watching the Rebel troops do the very same in TESB. You’ve then got the AT-ATs walking towards the base, taking the place of the “chicken walker” AT-STs in this film next to the bigger “gorilla walkers” and a squadron of Rebel ‘ground speeders/gliders’(?) heading out to meet them but prove ineffective (instead of a squadron of air speeders that are at least of some effective use).
It is through and through an alternate and revamped battle of Hoth but just at the end of the movie instead of the beginning. I could tell this just from the trailer as well, I didn’t need to see the movie to know they were borrowing heavily from TESB in this scene.
So the gliders throw up red dust, changing the landscape from white to a mix of red and white - this doesn’t change all the other factors or that it was all white beforehand. If the snow on Hoth wasn’t 10s of metres thick, say instead that it was only a light covering and the air speeders passing overhead blew parts of it away and the walkers churned it up, you’d instead have a landscape mix of brown dirt and white much like the red and white in TLJ but this doesn’t change the other fact that there are so many other similarities that they are hard to miss or ignore.
See, RJ actually wants you to think he is recreating Hoth so that he can pull some more rugs and subvert more expectations that he helps lead the audience down himself until he suddenly changes direction and goes “ah ha! But it’s not Hoth, see it’s salt and it’s red underneath, it’s a big steel door instead of an energy shield, these are gliders not air speeders, etc…”
.Val