Coming from a non-English speaking country I’m all in for the soft subs. My dad watched Star Wars in Italy in 1977 and later at some point in the 1980’s in Brazil, with my mom, and according to him there were no hard subs.
The Italian prints we’ve seen do have hard subs (in Italian, for both Star Wars and Jedi). They’d have to, because the Italian dub doesn’t translate those lines. I can’t say there weren’t subtitle-free prints anywhere, but there are a lot of prints out there, and all of them we’ve seen have hard subs in either English or another language.