The limitless universe that existed from 1977-1980 started to shrink as soon as Vader said “I am your father”, and just about everything that has happened since has continued to make it seem smaller. Even mainstream critics have started to notice that, while it’s supposedly set in an entire, sprawling galaxy far, far away, Star Wars feels very “small-town”. Everybody knows everybody, everything is too connected, and there are few real surprises.
I don’t entirely agree with this idea (I grew up in the generation after where the OT was on VHS and the Special Editions were my first theatrical Star Wars experience), HOWEVER I can completely understand this sentiment. There’s something about the 1977 Star Wars that captures this feeling of limitless possibilities - producing an intense, child-like curiosity about what’s beyond the horizon. The fact that the movie is set in “the furthest place from the bright center of the Universe” (to paraphrase), instead of like, some 1977 equivalent of Coruscant, along with the very lived-in aesthetic, the straightforward directing, and the hinted back stories, all probably play a large role in producing these feelings. There’s so much that’s tantalizingly unknown that we only get glimpses of, out on the frontier in a vast cosmos. (I get a similar vibe occasionally from Ridley Scott’s first Alien movie).
But nowadays, all of that enticing Star Wars imagery has turned into “IP”. Like, every single weird alien in the Mos Eisley Cantina was at one point strange and new - each weird creature suggested an entirely different civilization or world existing somewhere out there. But now they keep copy-&-pasting the same Cantina aliens everywhere in Star Wars. Every Star Wars bar, outpost or underground nightclub has the same alien species. (We paid $4 billion for the rights to hammerhead alien! We’re damn well putting hammerhead alien in our new Star Wars cafe!) Meanwhile, there’s an exhaustively detailed Wookiepedia article about the history and culture of each species.
While I understand this aspect, it’s hard for me to really understand how the Vader revelation in particular shrinks the Universe. Of course, I get how the Vader revelation can be seen as narrowing the focus of the story to this one family. But… even without the Vader revelation, Luke, Ben Kenobi and Vader were always intimately connected and likely to be the focus of any potential sequels. (Ben trained Vader, Vader killed Luke’s father, etc. Luke was always about two degrees of separation from the Emperor of the Galaxy.) The original Leigh Brackett script of ESB (which has mostly the same plot as the real ESB, except Vader is not Luke’s father) still focuses heavily on Luke and Luke’s relationship with Vader. Even if the “I am your father” revelation never happened, it’s hard to imagine the subsequent Star Wars sequels unfolding in a manner that didn’t revolve around Luke and Vader at their emotional core. Nothing hooks an audience more than character drama - so it’s difficult to imagine some alternate timeline where Star Wars sequels were made that didn’t continue the story of the main cast.
The real problem is Star Wars has lost the sense of the tantalizing unknown, the limitless possibility just beyond the horizon. Now we all know what’s beyond the horizon. It’s probably Tatooine. Or a planet that looks like Tatooine (and probably has Jawas or Jawa-equivalents). Or Coruscant again.
And it doesn’t help that every planet in the Galaxy is just a quick 1-hour trip away via hyperspace. I actually take the opposite view from the essay about “Star Wars as surrealism instead of sci-fi”. While I don’t want Star Wars to be hard science fiction, I think that if the sci-fi angle was played up more, it would be easier to maintain that sense of the tantalizing unknown. If it took months or years to travel from the Outer Rim to the core worlds, or if most of the Galaxy was remote and unexplored, or if the Empire lasted for centuries or millennia, instead of decades, etc - these are the sort of details that better convey this sense of vastness and possibility, and of the tantalizing unknown in fiction.