Well, all of JJ’s movies share a lot of similarities because he’s got an identifiable, strong personal style. But Into Darkness, save for the very poor decision to sample the ending from Wrath of Khan and invert it despite it not having any set up (or real point, considering we’d already seen at this point Khan isn’t even the real bad guy in the film, more like an antihero), had some similar problems, but it also wasn’t as incoherent from a storytelling perspective. Almost all the beats it was trying to pay off were set up and investigated at least a little. It’s not a successful film overall, but there are more effective moments in it, and those moments are more competently strung together. It’s a much more consistently constructed and executed movie than The Rise of Skywalker.
It’s still very similar though, so I think that the idea Disney “made JJ do this” is pretty unlikely. This is all very close to something he would make both in style, laughable content, lack of imagination.
Bingo!
And as we saw with Solo, there is little the studio can do to an uncooperative director other than fire them. And the backlash from the Director’s Guild would be nasty and jeopardize all future projects if they tried to interfere any other way.