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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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