I think you just nailed it perfectly Dre with “cinematic inbreeding” being the most efficiently accurate way of explaining the ST’s constant borrowing and repurposing of the OT along with a near constant appeal to nostalgia in so much that the latest trailer uses pretty much half of its runtime for actual OT and PT footage with the OT footage itself making up around a third of the total runtime.
Disney are pushing a very mixed message in obviously wanting to sell their new, young cast of characters (often at the expense of the old beloved OT characters), even pushing a literal 4th wall message in TLJ with “let the past die…” but are so afraid of not getting enough bums on cinema seats that they’ll use the OT at every chance they get, knowing it is what everyone already loves and gets people’s attention. So you get this weird circular behaviour of “forget about your old, tired and failed heroes and look at our new awesome young and diverse heroes out to actually save the day” all the while playing out the same plot points of the OT with a few jumbled up for good measure and shoving all this imagery and references of the OT in your face while someone like Rian claims to be breaking new artistic ground because he shoehorned some manufactured bait and switches into Star Wars.
Because the ST is so referential of the OT, in many ways it is literally a pale shadow of the originals that has been lazily twisted and skewed to try and make it look different.
Let the past die is not the message of any of this. That came from the Jaded Luke and Kylo Ren, neither of them expressing the main focus of the films at the time they said it.
I think the problem is that even when the messages are spelled out (i.e. Kylo is the bad guy his view is wrong) people want to take the wrong idea away. A lot of this thread is just conjecture and ideas about why it’s going to fail just because people think it should, rather than because it realistically could.