Wow, that article gets so much wrong. Hindsight is 20/20, of course.
It is interesting that Robert Watts was apparently planning at one point to film ROTJ’s desert scenes in Tunisia and the Endor scenes in Germany’s Black Forest.
A sign of GL and company’s exhaustion with SW & desire to just “get it done” that both locations ended up being filmed in the US, I suppose. Rather like the US-based filming of the similarly creatively bankrupt Crystal Skull.