and lucas was heavily criticized for comtradicting himself. does that excuse other creators contradicting some stuff that came before? imo no it doesn’t.
In my mind it all comes down to what services the story. Vader as Luke’s father is a retcon but also one of the most powerful developments in the saga (and cinema history, really). Luke and Leia as siblings isn’t awful but doesn’t ultimately have much bearing on ROTJ. Padme dying in ROTS contradicts a line in the OT but in my opinion is absolutely essential to the story that ROTS is telling, and the movie would be worse without it.
Basically, it depends. Many fans are binary about these things. I don’t think that’s the right way to go about it.
I think Lucas could have done something different to end ROTS. We didn’t need to see the twins in their new homes. We didn’t need to see Padme die. Because we did see it, someone watching in episode order would know before ROTJ that Leia is Luke’s sister. If they had done the ending differently they could have made the audience wonder and we wouldn’t have found out until later. We would be surprised to learn that Vader is Luke’s father and surprised to learn he has a twin sister. On the other hand, the end of ROTS is very fulfilling because it closes the circle and brings us back to where the saga began. It made for a very circular story for the first 6 episodes. If you watch in 4,5,6,1,2,3 order it solidly ends the story. But Lucas always had an idea for another trilogy (the first idea had 12 movies and the cut down to 9) and they took his idea and developed it. Kathleen Kennedy said they did it as they would any movie idea. So some of GL’s core ideas are still there (Luke in exile and a female student) and others came from Abrams, Kasdan, and Johnson. They communicated. Some things in TLJ were because of Rian. A lot of things in TLJ were because of TFA or ideas for IX (which wasn’t going to be Abrams at that point). And I hear Lucas is back with an advisory role in the IX script. I think the final version of the ST we get is going to be different but similar to what Lucas would have done himself. Probably less controversial than had he done it all himself (his best work has involved other people being involved in the creative process, fleshing out his ideas).