The Exogol battle in Rise of Skywalker is a disgusting mess. And the Prequel battles are mostly just CGI vomit. Somehow, neither the Prequels nor Sequels managed to have a space battle anywhere near as emotionally intense or visually engaging as the Battle of Endor filmed in 1983. And the problem goes well beyond the visual overload in the Prequels and Rise of Skywalker.
The problem is these movies have forgotten how to build up tension and suspense leading up to the battle. There’s rarely like, a briefing room scene, where they go over the objectives, the stakes, etc., so we can follow the action during the battle and have some emotional reaction to the ups and downs, the set-backs and victories. Like with the Battle of Endor, when they realize the deflector shield is still up, we understand how fucked they are, because we know the mission objectives. Then the fleet of Star Destroyers shows up, and then we discover the Death Star superlaser is operational. The Rebels then try to merge their fleet with the Star Destroyer fleet in desperation, just to survive long enough until the shield generator comes down.
But in the Prequels you have stuff like the Battle of Coruscant in ROTS which, while visually stunning occasionally, is mostly just an emotionally empty CGI mess. We don’t know who is winning or losing, nothing that happens really means anything because we don’t know how it affects the overall battle. The battle itself is really just a backdrop against which the main characters try to carry out a rescue operation. That’s fine - but there’s never any other proper space battles with clearly communicated objectives, and action we can get invested in by following the ups and downs, set backs and victories. I mean, in the Death Star attack in A New Hope, pretty much every single X-wing that gets shot down feels significant.
In Force Awakens, they tried to redo the Death Star attack from A New Hope. They even had a briefing scene, but they kind of play it for laughs and meta-jokes. Then the actual battle just feels rushed and emotionally empty. You can’t really follow the action or react emotionally to any ups and downs. There’s no main characters even involved. Then in Rise of Skywalker, they sort of tried to setup some mission objectives for the Exegol battle - I think they had to take out a communications tower or something, but the whole thing makes very little sense. The battle also quickly devolves into a cloud of nonsense, at one point showing horses charging across the surface of a Star Destroyer, and Palpatine electrocuting the entire atmosphere.