There’s a real dark side to the Star Wars fandom and it came out in force after TLJ. The amount of the so called reviews and the negative comments/ attacks on social media that point their hatred for it towards the fact that there is more diversity, more women taking the lead roles, Disney is pandering to the SJW’s etc is disgusting.
The “Dark Side” of the Star Wars fandom has always been there. The reaction from die-hard Lucas worshipers to campaigns to get the OOT released are an example of it. The insane anger towards the Legends banner being added to the EU. Even a lot of the devout OT fanboys that act like the prequels “ruined their childhood.” The Star Wars fanbase has and always has had a really creepy religious fervor to it. As for the “diversity agenda” people, I’d wager that most of the alt-right folks complaining about women in Star Wars aren’t even fans but are just latching onto something that they didn’t care about before purely so they can push their backwards political agenda. They did the same thing with the Ghostbusters remake.
I’m guessing that the reason Disney used female leads for the first new trilogy and Rogue One is because they knew that the next decade of stand-alone films will revolve around male characters so they wanted to try and preemptively balance it out.