I can’t say I’ve seen the earlier X-Men movies recently. Have they aged badly? Logan was pretty awesome and now I’ve fixed New Mutants it’s a much easier watch.
The movie harked back to the time when I started reading comics regularly, so maybe I engaged with the material a bit more. I felt it dragged a bit in the middle but it was otherwise ok.
Personally, I think the earlier movies are decent. There are a few inconsistencies but nothing horrific until the soft reboot. They took a bit too long to bring Storm to the fore but Hugh and Famke had great chemistry. I felt that the characterisation in the four prequel movies was just too beige and the focus on Charles, Magneto, Quicksilver, and Mystique seriously detracted from making them proper X-Men movies.
Maybe some of the cosmic imagery from Dark Phoenix could be sewn into X3 to hint at an external force influencing Jean. Maybe some of the teaser imagery from Apocalypse could be used somewhere, alongside some of the Cable footage from Deadpool 2, laying the ground for a decent re-telling of the Apocalypse story.
But I think as the existing movies stand, X1-3, the Wolverine, and DoFP do fit together well, book-ending Jean and Logan’s story, and New Mutants and Logan lay some decent groundwork for Mr Sinister’s story. We just need a decent Marauders movie!