If the OT was released in today’s climate, it would receive the exact same level of ridicule as the prequels and sequels.
Sorry, but this isn’t a sentiment that makes sense to me. To focus just on the original film; it was like nothing people had ever seen in '77 with special effects that were invented for the movie and made by a group of world-class talents at the pinnacle of their skills, and which tapped into the zeitgeist so deeply that most of the people in the US had seen the movie, mostly through word-of-mouth, by the time it left theaters.
To extract the film from its historical context and compare it to something released today is ludicrous, especially since it would undoubtedly suffer John Carter issues where it is seen as predictable due to the multitude of films that had been made in emulation of the elements which made Star Wars great. It’s like saying the moon landing wasn’t actually that great because we know how to make better spaceships and would do that differently today.
Finally, you say ‘in today’s climate’, but I assume you mean in the climate of the Star Wars fandom or movie fans in general. People are always comparing new movies in a franchise to the originals, so these films couldn’t be released ‘in today’s climate’, because that same climate has been built out of expectations set by…the originals.
Here’s an acid test - if the originals were objectively no better than the prequels or sequels, with rudimentary and sometimes embarrassingly dated effects, then I guarantee that there would be talks to remake them. Robocop, The Thing, Final Recall…they all got the remake treatment. But films like Blade Runner, 2001, Indiana Jones…nobody even considers a remake even though they would have massive name recognition, and I think we all know the reason for that isn’t some arcane legal one.