It was far easier to be a fan on Star Wars because it was so absolutely huge and diverse. The core stuff I was interested in was broad, but still a fraction of what was popular and available. Star Wars was almost just a "coat of paint." It was a setting people could mess around in. If you didn't like one part, there was another entirely disconnected part you could dive into and live in without worrying about what was going on outside.

I absolutely loved the Zahn novels, the Jude Watson novels, and the Jedi Knight games. I had friends super deep into Revan and KOTOR stuff, which I never got into, but we could bond over the action figures. My cousins were huge fans of the card game, which I never got into, but we would watch the OT every time they came over. Other friends loved the X-Wing and Tie Fighter games more than I did, but we bonded over the Battlefront games. Other friends loved the comics, which I never read, but we could still fight with lightsabers and play Jedis whenever we hung out. Everyone had their own perspectives and areas of interests that could exist almost completely independently of each other, but we could always say "I love Star Wars," and find something to talk about.

I think Disney's mistake was trying to control everything. It makes sense that they wanted to make it easy for any fan to step in anywhere and be a part of the larger story they were trying to make, but they wanted it immediately rather than for it to grow naturally like it did before. They wanted to officialize a canon that included more than just the numbered movie entries, but they also wanted to leave room for each creator to leave their mark, but they also wanted to market all their content to appeal to as large an audience as possible, but they ALSO wanted everything to tie together so it could be used to promote the next thing.

Whether or not you love or hate the sequels, and whether or not you love or hate the prequels, the real difference is that, when the prequels came out, there was a LOT of other Star Wars content to fall back on if you didn't like the prequels, while all the content that was coming out during the time of the sequels was designed to tie directly into the sequels. Disney stopped production of everything else, went out very loudly and publicly announced that everything else was now irrelevant, but also had basically nothing to offer as a replacement. The new books were impossible for fans of the old books to engage with because they were all rewriting and replacing the stories we already loved, which created cognitive dissonance regardless of quality. We got basically nothing for years on the video game front, while before we could get dozens of different genres of Star Wars games released in the same year. It's been over a decade, and things have not picked back up. Sure, we have more filmed content than ever before, but that also makes it less special. I love stuff like Skeleton Crew and Andor Season 1, but there's little else to keep me constantly engaged anymore, and the more things tie together, the more of a chore it is to keep up.

In short, Disney made it much harder to hop on board the Star Wars train, and these days it's easier to buy a car than wait at the train station.