The best thing about the EU is that it at least demonstrated the bare-minimum level of expected competence by advancing the story after ROTJ. The OT characters changed and grew, faced new challenges, and the political landscape of the Galaxy fundamentally changed as a consequence of what happened in the OT.

Of course, that’s really the absolute minimum I would expect for any post-ROTJ continuation of Star Wars. In any sane Universe, I probably wouldn’t actually praise the EU for basic, minimum story-telling competence. But unfortunately, sanity in Star Wars is long gone. We now have a canonical post-ROTJ narrative that basically amounts to a Galactic Control+Z, undoing all narrative progress, resetting the Galaxy back to Empire vs. Rebels, and repeating the OT story-line (poorly) with different characters. There’s no New Republic or new Jedi Order or any of the stuff Star Wars fans had anticipated since 1983… no, none of that stuff. There’s no continuation of the story.

So as silly as the EU can get, we’ve arrived at a point where it actually makes sense to praise the EU for understanding basic storytelling concepts like “cause and effect” and “continuing where we left off”.

The EU is really the only post-1983 incarnation of Star Wars that got the basics more or less correct. The Prequels went off in a stupid direction, and the Sequels were not actually proper sequels but rather a soft-reboot followed by an incoherent mess. Nobody got the bare-minimum basics right except the EU.