Fandom in general is pretty mentally unhealthy. It only makes sense that smaller, more intensely-focused sub-fandoms would be seen as being even more “yikes.” The mainstreaming of fandom is maybe one of the worst things to have been facilitated by the internet in the 21st century, not just in how it helped normalize toxicity in discourse, but in how entertainment discussions have become both distraction from, and proxy for, ACTUALLY important and and meaningful things happening in the real world.
The more we get distracted, the more we convince ourselves the distractions are more meaningful than they actually are - the more meaning we undeservedly project onto entertainments, the more warped and shrunk our perspectives become, the more toxic and reactionary we are - until the baseline we occupy every time we log on is frequently scared, angry, helpless, and disillusioned, at all times, of most things; things which we can’t control and never could because we don’t actually make movies or tv shows, we just watch them - which only causes us to further pursue pop culture distractions as a form of “escapism.”
It’s a pretty dumb, ugly, vicious circle that’s been mainstreamed and normalized to a fairly disturbing degree. Its partially why our cultural memory is maybe two-weeks long at best.
Anyway - way off topic, I know, so back to the ending shot: I don’t think the editor has any reason to lie about that final shot, so I’ll take their word for it, and it’s honestly a lot more likely that crowdsourced internet detective work wasn’t correct than the editor is lying to cover something up. There’s a lot more evidence of the former being frequently true than there is the latter.
And yes, Rey being Palpatine’s hidden granddaughter is some JJ Abrams “Spock just happens to be in the exact cave that young Kirk escaped from a monster into” level coincidence, LOL