Rey’s initial shock at Leia’s death is too important to cut. Her realization that she just inadvertently took advantage of Leia’s death to get a cheap shot in on her son, her tearful little moment with the wounded Kylo. Her decisions to heal Kylo and to go into self-exile both hinge on this moment, because she realizes how dark she just went and that Kylo did in fact still have some good left in him (an idea she mostly abandoned after her failure in TLJ, hence the TLJ callback in this scene with “I did want to take Ben’s hand”).
Keeping Leia alive longer only lessens the impact of her death, and I don’t think it’s worth it just to explain Han’s appearance as a magic trick. If we really want to imply that Leia was directly responsible for Han’s appearance, my recommendation would just be to move the disappearance of Leia’s body to be after Kylo tosses his lightsaber (instead of its original placement after Kylo’s corpse disappears).
Man, there’s just no pleasing you haha j/k. I bet I could still keep Rey’s reaction in there, just cut the ‘Leia’ part. Arguably, she could still have that dark moment realization without Leia dying, and still want to heal Kylo. I don’t think Leia dying in that moment has to happen to make this work. And I did think too about moving up her body fading into the Force. If you think Leia sticking around to conjure up Han takes too long, then it’s definitely too long to wait for the Exogol conclusion for her to join the Force. I don’t think it’s unrealistic that her laying down was actually her just getting into a more comfortable position to begin the Han thing. Again, people may disagree, but Leia saying ‘Ben’ shouldn’t kill her. Force users communicate and sense things like that through the Force all the time without dying. A Luke-esque act like projecting someone across the galaxy is what would realistically kill her. Again, no disrespect meant…appreciate the honest feedback.