It’s funny how the characters portrayed as a child abducting, brainwashing, dispassionate, celibate cult are the heroes!
Being honest at least this makes Luke’s beliefs in TLJ feel much more poignant.
I feel like it does quite the opposite. The stuff the prequel-era Jedi do is pretty despicable. Child trafficking, unjust wars, terrorizing the galaxy, etc. With the implications of the prequels, and prequel-era EU content in mind with TLJ, it feels like musing on whether or not the Nazi Party had to end.
Ignoring all that makes TLJ more poignant. The problems with the Jedi Luke specifically mentions in TLJ are a lot more subtle and focused. “The Jedi were too possessive of the Force, which caused their downfall and the suffering during the Empire” vs “The Jedi kidnapped children and committed war crimes and other acts of violent atrocity”.
It’s also why, if the prequels were really going for a deconstruction of the Jedi Order, it didn’t really work. But I really don’t think they did, I think the “The Jedi were bad, actually” is more of an EU concept than something actually supported by the prequels.
The prequels feel like they try to justify the weird behavior of the Jedi/Republic. Anakin doesn’t actually turn to the dark side because the Jedi failed to help him because of their weird celibacy rules. In the prequels, Anakin turns to the dark side because he wasn’t celibate. The celibacy rules were there for a reason. The Republic isn’t actually a corrupt, non-functioning state, the prequels trace pretty much any problem with the Republic back to Palpatine. None of its problems are inherent in the prequels. The Jedi train toddlers for a reason, if you start as a Jedi too old, bad things happen. Kidnapping children is just an implication you get from reading between the lines.
This is why I don’t think you miss much from cutting this stuff out of the prequels. They weren’t actually part of any deep storyline until the EU recontextualized them to be. The celibacy rule is just there to make Anakin and Padme’s romance a forbidden one, for example. Better to cut this kind of stuff out to avoid the problems they bring.
But that’s getting a little off-track, since this is the OT edits to fit the PT and ST thread, not the PT and ST edits to fit the OT thread.