In any case, when confronted with the choice to turn to the dark side, Rey makes the same choice as Luke. That’s because they are both essentially good people.
When Luke was tempted by Vader and Palpatine, he rejected the offer. It wasn’t Luke’s training, it wasn’t something he learned along the way, he just was a good person. That’s why we like him. The same goes for Rey. One thing we’ve known about Rey from the beginning, when she takes in and protects BB-8, is that she’s good. Ultimately, it came down to a moral choice.I don’t think people give the writers the proper credit for Rey’s character. People simply focus on how good she is at using a lightsaber, when training is not about ability, but about character. I also think that sometimes people mistake flaws in the storytelling with political agendas, and that’s really unfortunate. I wish there was something better to do, but I though I could at least write about it.
I think that boiling Luke and Rey down to ‘Good People’ ignores a lot of what makes these characters unique. Let’s just start with the example you gave:
Rey, a scavenger who scrapes by each day with barely enough to eat, nevertheless refuses to take ownership of BB-8 or sell it for what must be weeks of food. In contrast, Luke has no qualms with the buying and selling of droids and will even hunt down R2-D2 while strongly suspecting that he really belongs to old Ben. Luke’s interest in the droids, at least in the beginning, is contained to their involvement in the Rebellion. The reason we as an audience believe that Luke truly cares for them is because he treats them as human servants rather than unfeeling machines, but that doesn’t make Luke nearly the selfless person Rey is when we meet her.
Luke has a core of idealism, which goes hand in hand with its inherent flaws - naivete and delusion. These flaws drive his story toward its natural conclusion in the Original Trilogy. It is this idealism which I think people mistake for inherent goodness in his character, but goodness has no flaws. If Luke were an inherently good person he would have immediately returned R2 to Ben and gone on to campaign for droid rights instead of killing thousands of people in the name of a terrorist organization.
A good person would have treated Yoda as an equal from the outset, would have heeded him during his training, and would have stayed and kept his promise instead of naively running off with the expectation that he could save his friends. It was not goodness which made him seek out the light in Vader, but idealism of the Jedi ways and of his mental image of his father which made him believe that a Jedi could never be truly evil. This is why Luke’s final confrontation with Vader is so great - he is vindicated through the very flaws of naivete and blindness, without which he would never have underestimated the ability of the Emperor to destroy him.
What I’m trying to say with all of this is that being a good person doesn’t make for compelling drama. If Rey were simply a good person, her story would be as dry as Tatooine in a drought. Luckily there’s more to Rey than that, but I argue that her driving characterization is one of goodness, which is inherently boring. If instead she were truly searching for belonging and personal mentors, her flaws would be defining aspects of her character and lead to great drama. In such a world, Rey would have taken Kylo’s hand because she has no other mentor, but instead her primary motivator in this scene is her essential, boring goodness and the movie suffers for it.