Lucas’ conception of the Jedi being weird emotionally stunted monks (which did not exist until he really started writing Episode I, either) was one of the worst decisions he made in the 90s, honestly. Along with aging Anakin down to 8, and not making Padme the main character of the Prequel trilogy.
he made a ton of absolutely terrible calls in his mythology as he made it up, and because so much of his own self-mythologizing is built around the grandiosity of his own creativity, he basically couldn’t retcon his own bad storytelling instinct to arrive at any of the interesting endpoints his bad setup COULD be saved by.
That Trevorrow wound up looking at the ingredients Lucas laid out for his mythology and arrived at an answer that makes SOME kind of emotional/philosophical sense (vs the dogmatic adherence to what “Balance of the Force has to mean”) kinda speaks to how stunted and forced every aspect of Jedi dogma, both textually AND metatextually.
It’s like Lucas (and Lucasfilm) forgot all this shit is made up, and the only real use any of it has is for allegorical storytelling, and for figuring out a way to use those elements in the pursuit of saying SOMETHING interesting about our own world and lives. Instead everyone at the company is more interested in protecting the canonical integrity of a completely made up religion as if it were a “real” one.
You nailed it.