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Sure, I'll absolutely agree that the core problem is the overall management of the franchise and lack of vision.
But I'm not sure that following up a stale retread of ANH with a stale retread of ESB is that much of a betrayal, really? That sounds more like he understood the brief. To the extent that he tried to do anything even a bit more interesting than just making the OT again (and again I think the extent to which TLJ is subversive or radical is wildly over-stated), I'm more inclined to give him credit for at least trying something. Sure, it didn't really succeed, but I give a film-maker more credit for trying to do something, even if they fail, than I do one for just painting by numbers. If nothing else, a TLJ that just painted by numbers would have done nothing to arrest the decline.
Quarrels between authors are, as you say, not unknown from the EU. EU author-feuding or attempts to undermine or pull back on each other were common - Traviss and the Mando hissy fit, Troy Denning misunderstanding or trying to retcon NJO, Timothy Zahn sniping at Dark Empire in Hand of Thrawn, KJA writing Callista and the various Luke shipping wars, you name it. I feel a bit ambivalent about all that in hindsight. It was undoubtedly bad from the perspective of maintaining a uniform level of quality, but it also meant that the EU, lacking a single dominating authorial voice, became a case of survival of the fittest. The Luke shipping wars were not resolved by some voice from above coordinating all the others - instead a number of different authors wrote love interests for Luke and eventually the one that achieved the most buy-in from the fans was eventually given the nod. (Ironically, the only one that wasn't originally written as a love interest.) Callista and Gaeriel and all the others have just been dismissed with "yeah, the early EU was weird". The Mandalorian stuff is a huge mess and there are multiple contradictory ideas of who the Mandalorians are as a people - Traviss and Filoni are probably the biggest influences, but let's not underestimate the TotJ comics, the KotOR portrayals, even Republic Commando - and generally the ideas that resonated were taken up by subsequent authors, and the rest abandoned. The EU was a big pool where different authors sank or swam, and because Lucasfilm back in the day were quite generous with the license, a lot of people tried different ideas. And now in hindsight, well, ask any EU fan and they will give you a curated list of the good bits, and those are the parts that live on.
ESB built on ANH. It maintained the same foes and made Vader even more interesting. TLJ jettisons the main bad guy and leaves us with a guy who lost to an untrained rando and a comic relief General Hux. It wasn't ESB at all. Superficially, I grant.
Maybe if Rian had actually turned Rey evil as some are suggesting. But it didn't. Which is why I say it's a "fuck you" movie. It doesn't even give you a watered down ESB. If you're too constrained to be truly subversive, don't LARP.
There was an important difference: core stuff had a heavier lift to change. Even when Lucas couldn't even pretend to give a fuck you were not allowed to kill off an Original Trilogy major without permission. This is why Chewbacca's death in Vector Prime required approval and was supposed to be a big deal. Yes, fuck around with who Jaina Solo is going to end up with, fight it out with the comics. But the idea that you can character assassinate and then actually assassinate Han and Luke and do nothing with Leia...there'd be some complaints.
Also, the medium is different. It's easier to experiment with very cheap books compared to your one shot at one of the most anticipated sequels in blockbuster history. (One could suggest that they should have considered the EU as a giant laboratory and learned from the mistakes and distilled the successes like the early MCU instead of throwing it out and remaking the same mistakes all over again)
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