Not sure which of the prequels is the best/least-bad. RotS is the easiest to swallow, but TPM has the actual story. And as for AotC, well, it’s cringier than TPM and only barely has more of a story than RotS, but it has some cool action scenes and the Obi-Wan part of the movie is kind of cool.
I’d argue that RotS is just as “cringe” as the other two, but hides it well behind slightly more competent direction and more lively acting. There’s a reason RotS memes are a thing. Most of Palpatine’s scenes are super hammy, some of the action sequences look really cartoony, most of the nods to the OT feel like they’re one step away from winking at the camera, and the dialogue is maybe even more tonaly out of place at times than the previous two films. If AotC suffers from underacting, then RotS suffers from a huge case of overacting. I know some people would prefer that, but it always sort of takes me out of the film.
Also TPM feels like too much of a singular story. Most of the film is set on Tatooine, and it mostly follows Qui-Gon’s POV exclusively apart from some Anakin scenes. That’s why The Battle of Naboo is so good. It finally shifts into the classic style of jumping around and showing all different aspects of the story. AotC stays more true to the OT format of showing the story from many different view points and even more of the villians’ POVs. RotS sort of does this, but it feels more flat since it’s mostly just Anakin and Obi-Wan’s parallel stories, and Obi-Wan is trapped in a video game style cutscene for most of that.
AotC is far from perfect, but it balances out a little better out of the three for me. TPM and RotS are two different sides of the scale, but AotC feels somewhere in the middle and makes it the least offensive, at least personally. It feels like the film that’s closest to classic Star Wars even if it misses that mark a lot of the time. RotS felt like it was trying to be too “edgy”. The Clone Wars finale is a better example of how to emulate that classic Star Wars tone but still tell a much darker story.