Here’s a hot take that might upset a subset of the forum: Fans haven’t “started to come around and start showing the prequels the appreciation that they should have gotten in the first place”. It’s almost exclusively the fans who always loved the prequels unironically continuing to love the prequels unironically, be they the gushers from the days of yore or the kiddies who’ve grown up on them now adding their voice to the echo chamber.
The only thing I can say in terms of appreciating or reevaluating the Prequels, is that the Disney Sequels at least made me appreciate how George Lucas really tried to make his Prequels different from the OT in terms of story, aesthetics, locations, plot, themes, etc. The Sequels came off to me as mostly soulless regurgitations of the OT synthesized by a particularly boring AI (with the partial exception of TLJ, which presented an entirely different form of sucking). This made me at least appreciate Lucas’ desire to actually tell a story, rather than just shamelessly capitalize off of the OT.
And yet, sadly, the Prequels still seemed to suck the few times I rewatched them over the years; they just suck in very different ways than the Disney films.
The core issue is Lucas has some really inspired ideas, but sucks badly at writing (a fact he admits on multiple occasions) and seems to have a very different philosophy about the fundamental nature of Star Wars than a significant percentage of the original OT fanbase, as well as a significant percentage of the people whose creative input shaped the OT.