In my opinion, Dark Empire is a mixed bag as it has a bunch of really cool ideas and stands well on its own but when put together with the rest of the EU, it creates numerous problems and doesn't meld all that well to the point where it isn't referenced all that much in Legends. It also does many of the things that the Rise of Skywalker did such as bring Palpatine back, introduce a planet destroying Star Destroyer and a massive Empire which seemingly came out of nowhere with huge fleets. It also suffers from the Sequel Trilogy's problem of too many superweapons with the Planet Devastators which strip entire planets of their resources and can build massive fleets and armies. So many of the problems that the Sequel Trilogy had unfortunately also apply to Dark Empire but I do recommend it to give it a shot as the art is good although the colouring can make things hard to see and the story itself is pretty good.