I am reminded of a frequent point they used to make on the Cracked Podcast about suspension of disbelief. In The Dark Knight Rises, there’s a chase scene where Batman goes into a tunnel in broad daylight and exits at night. This is absolutely a textbook hole in the movie, but when the movie came out almost everyone didn’t notice it until it was pointed out to them. The Cracked folks considered this a mark of effective movie-making rather than an egregious mistake, because audiences were swept up in the movie enough not to notice that flaw in the logic. That’s how I felt about all of these nitpicks about the in-universe rules of space travel in TLJ. I was engaged enough in the story that was in front of me that I was not giving any thought at all to whether or not it was 100% consistent with the last eight films (which, it’s worth noting, are not entirely consistent with each other either). I get that that’s not enough for everyone, but it’s enough for me.
This is very true. As I said, I think the audience wasn’t supposed to notice. When the audience isn’t sufficiently engaged so that they do notice such oddities, I blame those who made the film; as is suggested by your description of the Cracked folks’s view also. In general, a filmmaker should avoid these types of things. If you have too many, that can cause an audience to disengage. My main criticisms of the movie have to do with the overall story and characters. I am very forgiving of incongruities in physics or night-to-day kind of continuity. Holdo’s hyperspeed unprecedented ramming, the bombers, lasers arcing, even the new Force powers are good by me. What really gets to me is not understanding characters’ actions/motivations. That strikes me as a fault of the storytelling. If a movie works for you despite these issues, that is great.