If you see news about it on a general outlet that lets the readers give ‘reactions’ there are a lot of thumbs down over SW in general lately. It’s impossible to say what the far reaching vibes are because what we usually see is ultra hyped Celebration types or ultra jaded social media types. Personally I don’t care but I would wait until it’s been released to see how it goes.
It’s impossible to say for sure, but the large number of negative reactions is probably meaningless. The people that go to those websites and click the “thumbs down” button do not represent a random uniform sample of all potential movie-watchers. Rather, they are naturally selected from the set of people who are inclined to express their opinion about Star Wars in the first place, i.e. people with strong pre-existing feelings about Star Wars. The average movie-watching public is not motivated to go click the “thumbs down” button on a Star Wars article.
This type of selection bias is rampant all over the Internet, and it skews everyone’s perceptions about “what everybody really believes”.
The only other thing I’ll add is that historically, main-line Star Wars trilogies have been released following a long period of zero Star Wars movies coming out. The first movie in every Trilogy always dramatically out-performs the 2nd and 3rd at the box office - often making around double what the 2nd and 3rd make. So it seems that the long period in between trilogies is one factor that contributes to the major success and hype of the first film in a new Trilogy. But Rise of Skywalker was released only like 4 years ago. And Disney+ continuously vomits out new Star Wars content. So who knows what will happen.
It’s crazy to reflect on how differently Star Wars was perceived from 1983 to May of 1999. A Star Wars movie was like… an absolutely monumental event, and Lucas was beloved as a master story-teller of almost mythic stature (… or maybe at least until 1997). And from 2006 to 2015, Star Wars was perceived by many as damaged, but still very special. But now a new Star Wars movie is just a new movie.