I would pin the similarities more on style than getting into all these story beats, Jakku establishes a world very similar to Tatooine and that’s putting it lightly. Not to mention the cantina filled with alien mercenaries, even Starkiller had a trench for X-wings to fly through just because.
ANH is about stopping the Death Star. TFA is NOT about stopping Starkiller. TFA is about finding Luke Skywalker. We know this thanks to each episode’s crawls.
They do blow up Starkiller by the end much like the Death Star at the end of ANH, which also has a similar mission, find the old Jedi who can help in Obi-Wan Kenobi, down to being the same task ordered by the same character. The pacing of events might diverge but calling it totally different feels like willful ignorance.
I always think about this clip from the making of Phantom Menace https://youtu.be/hxTIlu4ldbg and the idea that, being of a different time period before the war, the artisans were still designing the ships, before war and the empire had reduced the team to a rag-tag band of rebels with whatever junked up parts they could use. For the sequels it’s just X-wings and ties again, something you may not immediately think about as wrong but overall limits the world building, hoping IX will understand they need a bit more in scope of their own.