I agree with most of what you said. However, I also think you’re exaggerating a bit. The way you put it makes it sound as though there were virtually no Prequel fans between 2005 and 2018, and everyone who claimed to hate the movies genuinely felt that way. But that’s simply not true. Even between 2005 and 2018, there were plenty of people who enjoyed the Prequels to varying degrees, and not everyone who claimed to hate the movies genuinely hated them. The situation was much more nuanced.
You have to keep in mind that when trashing or making fun of something becomes popular, people tend to jump on the bandwagon, even if their public opinions don’t entirely reflect what they actually think. Teenagers and young adults are especially susceptible to following trends and conforming to the majority opinion. I’ve personally read plenty of comments online from people saying things like, “When I was a teen, I used to trash the movies and talk shit about them, but I didn’t actually dislike them all that much.” I’m not saying these people were the majority, but they certainly existed, and pretending otherwise is just as wrong as pretending the Prequels were universally loved.
Also, I think a lot of the extremism you see among some Prequel fans today is a reaction to the extremism displayed by certain hardcore OT fans back then. I wasn’t around at the time, but I’ve talked to plenty of people who lived through that era, and they’ve all told me that the atmosphere on many online forums and websites was unbearable. If you said anything positive about the Prequels, people would jump down your throat, insist that the movies were garbage and treat the Original Trilogy like it was the second coming of Christ, downplaying its genuine flaws in the process. Obviously, this doesn’t mean everyone who disliked the Prequels was being unreasonable, but there was definitely a toxic side to the discourse that made it difficult to have a balanced discussion about the movies.
So, again, I think the Prequel revisionism you mentioned is, to a significant extent, a reaction to the hostility that dominated much of the online Star Wars community for nearly a decade. Some fans have overcorrected and gone too far in the opposite direction, and I agree that pretending the Prequels were universally beloved from the beginning is inaccurate. But I also think it’s important to understand where this reaction came from. You can’t spend years treating an entire trilogy and its fans as a joke and then act surprised when some of those fans eventually push back against that narrative.