Hal, your argument’s made in perfectly good faith, so please take this the same. The fact that Imperial/FO troops have historically been primarily male and implicitly (or explicitly only in the EU) prejudiced organisations is valid. Just as a valid opposition to Holdo having purple hair, is that there was an observed soft rule in early SW design that Imperials would use unnatural colours and rebels would use natural ones.
But there’s still a couple of issues. Firstly but least importantly, that it’s not a hard rule that Disney are breaking by having female roles like this, because it hasn’t been made explicit in core media that these organisations have these prejudices. And it’s not like even with an established rule, that a writer couldn’t introduce the change with a throwaway line. (Especially in Star Wars… If Palpatine can “somehow” return, the First Order can “somehow” have included more women in its ranks.)
But mostly, it’s that adherence to canon or implicit soft rules isn’t the motivation of that poster and other similar posters. I’ll need to make generalised assumptions about people now, but it feels very safe to say that quotes like “Kathleen Kennedy mandated…” or “whammen whammen whammen” or “admiral gender studies” indicate that such posters are formally or informally a part of the broader movement which seeks to continue to suppress accurate and equal female representation. Or, to put it more succinctly, it’s not about Star Wars at all, it’s about women.
And this is where we get subjective, but the world needs better female representation. It needs women growing up to believe they are valid, and strong, and deserving of all the opportunities and privileges and securities men have. It needs men to accept, support, and celebrate that. I’m not going to justify that statement because nobody wants a feminist rant right now, but my point here is that, while your argument about canon is valid, the real-world gain of representation is far greater than the minor impact on inexplicit soft canon. So I think that needs to be the determining factor here - it’s certainly why I personally didn’t consider the option for my poll. End of main response.
As an aside, I wish I could credit Disney for this, but again, motivation is key. I believe that Kathleen Kennedy / other writers / Disney are moving towards being progressive, but I believe they’re capitalist first. KK/OW/D may have minor progressive leanings (I believe KK takes genuine pride in representation of diversity), but I believe that the real reason that Disney and other large companies are shifting progressive is because that’s the way the markets are shifting right now. It’s only relatively recently that entertainment media, especially movies, have realised that women can be just as passionate and engaged (and marketable) fans as men, once the representation is there. For example, I love that Forces of Destiny has a strong female focus, because that representation is still the greater good, but I know that behind the scenes for Disney it’s an investment in growing their market share.
I believe this is why there is broad backlash from typical anti-progressive communities too - for those for whom a progressive world is seen as a threat, they see this change in representation and they want to create a backlash, because backlash can hit these companies in their bottom line - they’re speaking in capitalism, because that’s what these companies respond to. This is also why I think it’s likely that Disney would never lean too hard into explicitly showing “the baddies” as particularly prejudiced - because being told “racism is what baddies do”, or “sexism is what baddies do”, or similar, is still something that risks a money-damaging public backlash from the kind of people who oppose this culture shift.