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A lot of people think that Star Wars went to shit at the prequels, and at that point it was still under the control of George Lucas.
Two very very different kinds of shit. One was "What the fuck was that guy trying to do? Does he even know his own material's appeal at all? Is he completely talentless and just got lucky before?"
The other was, "What the fuck was that corporation doing? Did they have no plan whatsoever?"
The latter is more typical of "the ghouls in charge of most of America's cultural legacy". The former was much more rare, I can't think of many other situations where someone ruined their own legacy like that.
I think it's pretty common for creators to have inconsistent output or to not understand what makes their own work good. A few other examples that come to mind:
Jane Austen thought Pride and Prejudice was her worst book
Paul McCartney believe his more recent work is much better than The Beatles
The Wachowskis have made a few fantastic movies (The Matrix is my favorite movie of all time) but most of their movies are crap
But I have no clue what allows some creators to consistently produce good work, and others to be occasionally genius but inconsistent.
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Chester Gould introduced life on the moon to the Dick Tracy comic strip.
Of course I did have to go back some years to get an example that's well known enough.
Jack Kirby also created a lot of stinkers in his later years, ending his career with Captain Victory.
Before she was unpersoned, JK Rowling was notorious on Twitter and other places for all kinds of silly retcons that no one asked for. (That trivia tweet was sourced from her own supplemental writing.)
Most people ate up her retcons, though, even if those people also thought they were a bit on the silly side. But a lot of her retcons played into the social justice narrative, so people were championing them.
She had the incredible good timing to create a record-shattering children's book which celebrated witchcraft and poked conservative Christians at the exact moment to perfectly puncture and deflate the resurgent American Christian monoculture when it was poised to retake America.
She also had the hilarious bad timing to be on the wrong side of the same culture war she inflamed, in such a way that her children's movie about sexual tension and ideological war between gay pagan former lovers Dumbledore and Grindelwald played by Jude Law and Mads Mikkelsen totally failed to make any cultural impact.
Oh gosh, is nobody familiar with British school stories and British fantasy for kids? Whatever Americans may have made of it (and it wasn't about "celebrating witchcraft"), in the British children's fiction context it was simply another example of an established genre (see Alan Garner, The Worst Witch, and many others, including C.S. Lewis and Narnia). That it became explosively popular was astounding and yes, probably a matter of luck, but it had nothing to do with "deflating resurgent American Christian culture" or whatever.
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The problem with Lucas is he used to have people who would tell him "no". Also he didn't direct most of the original trilogy. He's a great idea man, so long as someone filters through his ideas. He definitely gave the original trilogy it's heart. But when it was 100% Lucas, his short comings were amplified enormously.
Even the prequel trilogy looks good compared to The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker. The acting wasn't as good. The CG has not aged well. But it at least has a more coherent story from beginning to end. Not coherent in absolute terms. Just more coherent compared to the new trilogy. While hard to quantify, I also think it has more heart. There is still a sense of Lucas' creative voice coming through.
I think Lucas suffered from a bit of just losing his edge with age and success. He wrote Star Wars when he was young and hungry. He wrote the sequels when he was middle aged and had kids. Much the same happened with Stephen King and The Dark Tower. The first book is amazing, sharp, and very dark. By the end its silly as all hell. He wrote them over a span of decades, with a sizeable gap between the first and second in which the writing style changed a great deal.
To me, the difference between the prequels and sequels is kind of like the difference between The Room and Sharknado. They're both bad, but one is at least bad in an interesting way, being the bizarre fever dream of a single man, and the other is bad in a lazy corporate way with no particular vision (this is also why the Last Jedi is the best of the sequels: it may be a mess, but at least it's an ambitious mess).
I've gotten dozens of hours of entertainment over the years discussing all of George Lucas's strange choices and obvious missteps with friends. If nothing else, it is really fun to try to figure out what in God's name this man was thinking. On the other hand, I barely remember Rise of Skywalker and will probably never see it again, because "rushed production with a last minute replacement writer/director who clearly didn't want to be there" isn't an interesting enough reason for being bad to occupy any of my attention.
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