Regarding the OP, that’s exactly how I viewed canon back when I cared, before the EU was demoted to Legends. You don’t need a big corporation to tell you how to view canon. It’s all up to you.
The way I thought of it was that all the Star Wars books and movies are “based on real events”–that is, they’re all retellings of what “actually” happened, so some of them might stray more from the “truth” than others, or might introduce new elements, or be merely “inspired” by a true story. Thus, Jar Jar in the prequels is simply an interpretation of the real Jar Jar, and the sequence of events was perhaps modified. That left me free to imagine things as “really” being however I wanted them to be.