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I have no strong opinions about Tolkien, and I have not seen the show, but I see this come up a lot, and I think the answer is surprisingly obvious to people who aren't deeply invested in the fandom. This applies to everything from the MCU to LotR to Star Wars and Star Trek and every other property you care about.
Creators of new productions will very often hire writers who are not loving and doting fans but just in it for the paycheck, toss the source material, and ignore established lore, and the nerds will cry: "How could you do that? Don't you know that will make it suck?"
The answer is no, they don't know it will make it "suck" because they don't care if someone who's read the Silmarillion doesn't like what they did to Tolkien's lore. Nobody else (sigma the tiny, tiny percentage of the audience who's read the Silmarillion) cares either. MCU movies aren't made for you, the middle-aged dude who has boxes of X-Men and Avengers comics from the 80s in your cave. They are made for the new viewers they want to attract.
All they care about - all they care about - is getting more eyeballs. If reboots, reimaginings, and woke recastings will do that, that is what they will do. The tiny angry fists waved by a hundred thousand screaming fanboys is as nothing to the millions of (mostly young and not familiar with or invested in the source material) viewers they need to attract.
Now, an argument can be made that the work was popular in the first place because it was good, and tossing everything that made it good will make it bad. Sometimes that is true, sometimes it isn't. And of course bad writing is bad writing, so if RoP is bad because the writing is bad, it has little to do with how faithful the writers were to Tolkien and more to do with the fact that the writing is bad. Would it have been good if the writers were totally committed to Tolkien's vision? Who knows; maybe, probably not.
But fans really need to stop expecting that production studios care about whether it's "faithful" or "destroying the IP."
As for your other point: yes, they really do care more about making money than "pushing an agenda." They (the suits) will push an agenda if they think the agenda will make money. Writers and other creators on the team might be pushing agendas, to the degree they can get away with it, but the money men only care about whether it will be profitable. You'd see the whitest of all-white productions of the next Black Panther movie if suddenly black people stopped going to the movies, white people stopped watching anything with black people in it, and corporations no longer had to worry about how "lack of diversity" might affect the box office and critical reception (which affects the box office).
I very much doubt anyone in the head offices of Amazon or Sony or Disney is saying "Fuck next quarter's earnings, we need more diversity in this place, dammit!"
Yes, this is their attitude, and it is objectively wrong. Wide appeal never works without hardcore buy in. The hardcores are the tastemakers of virtually every IP, perhaps rom-coms excepted, I don't know much about that area. "But League of Legends" you will exclaim. Well, first DOTA2 is still incredibly successful despite being punishingly hardcore, and second, its weird you aren't touting the overwhelming success of the super casual Heroes of the Storm, which even had the benefit of tons of loved characters! Fact is, it was way too casual, it couldn't succeed even with you being able to make Jim Raynor fight Diablo and Arthas fight Kerrigan. LOL is the example of what you want to do, balance hardcore appeal and skill expression with the ability to be a bit casual. This is actually what early MCU did. Hardcores enjoyed Iron Man and Captain America. Hardcores don't enjoy She Hulk, and its tanked.
Citing a few anecdotal examples does not equate to "objectively wrong." But I suspect we'd end up arguing over every IP to be examined and debating to what degree the "hardcore" fans did or didn't like it. I mean, I'd point out that Black Panther and the Guardians of the Galaxy were C-listers who were almost unknown to anyone but hardcore Marvel fans before the movies. If you think those productions, or any others, stood or fell based on the enthusiasm of aging comic book fans, I think you are deluded.
I have not watched She-Hulk, only read reviews and summaries, which convinced me it was badly written and full of characters getting up on soapboxes and pandering to the presumed sensitivities of the audience, which is, again, bad writing. It didn't fail because it was "too woke," it failed because the wokeness appears to substitute for actual dialog and characterization.
A lot of the conversation here seems to be a combination of hardcore fans desperately wanting the studios to believe their opinions are important, and people desperately wanting to find evidence that "go woke, get broke" is true.
Meanwhile, what actually determines success is almost always mass appeal, which correlates only loosely to quality (some very good movies bomb, though usually of the more artsy variety, while the dreadful Michael Bay continues to print money, even if his most recent venture fell a little flat because it didn't feature giant robots), and what motivates studios is making money, with wokeness and social agendas being tolerated because you always have to let the creatives have their little causes while they make money.
Inconveniently for your argument, these are the things hardcores enjoy and complain about the lack of when absent.
Everyone enjoys dialog and characterization and complains about its lack when absent. Are you using some definition of "hardcore fan" that means basically "people with any degree of taste"?
Hardcores are among the only people in that set, yes.
That wasn't my question, but believing only trufans care about dialog and characterization and other markers of quality is not an uncommon affectation.
I'm saying hardcores are the most turned off by lack of quality. And among non-hardcores there are a much higher % that don't care about quality.
Hardcore fans are defined by their slavish devotion to some IP, if any group especially lacks taste it is hardcore fans. The tasteful enjoyers move on from a product when quality declines, the cultlike fans are the ones still buying iteration 37 even though quality went down the drain
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