It felt more like he was throwing OOT fans his scraps, since it was such a low quality version and a “bonus feature” but I guess this is old news. Of course now time has passed and you have strange people that believe this laserdisc rip represents the quality of that theatrical cuts.
This might have been his intention, to confine the memory of the original cuts to that inferior quality.
Lucas basically ‘confirmed’ that intention during the Cannes 2024 interview:
I love how he’s outright lying here. The fully restored original negative of the films existed for a short while in 1997 before they physically inserted the new material into it. and they even scanned that negative in 2K! Right now in the Lucasfilm archive, there exists a 1997 2K scan of the original restored negative, before any alteration. why didn’t they release that?