George Lucas got involved, multiple endings were shot, even internet fan theories were on the table, etc. It sounded like a mess, which is completely antithetical to what we saw in that documentary The Skywalker Legacy released by the studio. Regardless, I’d love to see all that deleted/alternate footage.
George Lucas didn’t “get involved,” and multiple endings weren’t shot. Multiple versions of the same ending were shot, (multiple takes, really. Again - just normal everyday moviemaking stuff) but the ending was always essentially the same. It’s a thing with Star Wars - a ton of the trivia everyone “knows” about Star Wars is basically just guesswork and rumor repeated enough that everyone accepts it because it’s easier to win online arguments that way.
The multiple endings thing especially - that was some guy on Twitter incorrectly reporting a story he saw via some other guy on Twitter, IIRC. Or Reddit, probably. Part of why it’s so easy for all this to become a YouTube scam for ad money is because even the “upstanding insiders” or whatever are just faking-it-til-they-make-it. People want to believe they know something other people don’t, it makes all the time spent chasing this stuff feel sort of worthwile, and at that point it’s just a matter of figuring out which flavor of fandom you prefer, the angry stuff or the blindly hopeful stuff. If you’re starting with a story pre-tainted with misinformation because the people volunteering for their insider “job” - however well-intentioned they might be - don’t know how to do it, it’s really easy to then further twist that misinformation to fit your chosen grift. Once everyone involved tacitly agrees facts don’t really matter, the game is on!
Knowing what actually happened is almost always secondary to attaining the feeling of knowing what happened. This isn’t just a Star Wars thing, either. But as with all things fandom, you see it in Star Wars “communities” because that same phenomenon happens in places where it’s actually important, too. This is just the safer, less consequential version of it.
edit: Apple News didn’t publish that. Apple News aggregated a MovieWeb post that is, itself, nothing more than some poor employee having to make a post out of Doomcock’s video. It’s all part of the same scam, basically. Nobody involved is doing their jobs correctly. An algorithm is posting something it thinks you’d like based on your history, and it served up a poorly written post that exists just to gather clicks off the headline that describes the content of a complete sham of a YouTube channel. The point isn’t to educate you on anything. That’s why it literally doesn’t matter to anyone involved if what they’re saying is true or not.