nah, more just like the sort of sneering hipster crowd took over forums and spread hate and then it became cool to hate > everything
Fandom isn’t influential enough to change the minds of the general audience NOW, and almost everybody’s on the internet. They were even less influential back in the early 2000s when hardly anyone was on it and the people who were, were all considered to be weirdos for spending their all their free time online talking about Star Wars movies.
Sneering hipsters didn’t really have anything to do with making it “cool to hate everything.” The much more plausible idea is that people actually believed in the opinions they were sharing. Those opinions could have been misguided, or not fun to hear, or really flimsy and easy to knock over, but I don’t think the large majority of them were being said simply because they thought that’s how you became a “sneering hipster” who is cool and respected.
What happened then is the same thing that’s happening now. The Star Wars fandom isn’t good at processing new Star Wars for what it is, until it’s become canonized to some degree via time. I don’t really like the movie myself, but time, and acceptance, has me in a place where if a 1080 fan-preservation from a 35mm film scan was announced here I’d be one of the first scrambling to try and download it because there are aspects of it I DO like, and I’d like to see them the way I remembered them that opening night.