I'd usually agree but the parts that most people are questioning the relevance of are the largest thematic anchors of the film.
The Last Jedi is transformative for Star Wars in a way that none of the others were. Whether Star Wars needed that is obviously a matter of personal opinions and as a long time SW fan who was interested in the Expanded Universe enough to watch a 160 video Youtube series about it, I've felt for many years that it did.
The problem with Star Wars is that the fans "ruined it" for lack of a better phrasing. They deified Luke, Vader/Anakin and the Skywalker bloodline into Poochie levels so that in every Star Wars story, all characters were either part of this elite blood or they were defined by their relationship to it. The Jedi and the Sith stopped being religious cults and started becoming centuries old institutions that were full of wisdom and whose existence was predicated on their own existence in a circular loop. X-Wings and TIE fighters and AT-ATs and lightsabers became iconography in the same way crucifixion images are and every change to them was met with horror that somebody could attempt to change the design of a revered icon.
Rian Johnson as a Star Wars fan understood this. He understood that Star Wars had lost its way. It was supposed to be a fun sci-fi action adventure character story but instead had turned into this huge display of sacred cows and fan servicing. The Last Jedi was about tearing it all down.
This is the whole point of the film. Snoke being slayed immediately by Kylo, Rey being nobody but a junkers daughter, Luke giving up on the Jedi way of life (and his deepest darkest fear in his pit is literally a mirror), Yoda burning down the tree, Poe mutineering, the "1%" arms dealers of the casino planet - all of these were specific rejections of inherited privilege and royal bloodlines by the new generation or an example of slaying sacred cows.
The Yoda tree scene was the perfect representation of this. Luke was fucking about and in his anger wanted to burn down the sacred tree but still couldn't because he was trapped in the groupthink of the Jedi. Yoda turned up, burned it down himself then told him that it was just a tree and that the interpersonal connections were the important thing about the Master-Padawan relationship rather than the dogma.
All the characters were serviced well. Rey and Kylo had the best romance in any Star Wars movie including the OT. They are intimately connected but divided by politics of how to save the Galaxy from all of this. Rey had to learn that her heroic father figures are not all they cracked up to be and are real people with flaws. Kylo slayed his Master who manipulated him and tried to live through him while destroying his own heroic father figure through his Vader-lite mask. Finn actually now has a reason to be part of the Rebellion and the growing heroism movie by movie is heartwarming to watch as his reasoning goes from chasing a girl to chasing an ideal. Poe had his responsibility arc and went from a rogueish young hotshot pilot into a leader of men. Luke accepted his mistakes were due not only to his hubris but also his cowardice. There's only real Leia who didn't get any character development but we got to see her force powers for the first time and how she was the matriarch of the Rebellion, acting as a motherly figure to both Poe and the Vice Admiral.
A large theme of the film was growth through failure. You'll notice that literally every single plan that anybody has in this film fails. Literally every single one by any person, no matter what side they're on or what they're trying to achieve. Some people think this means it's a bad film which is an incredibly odd criticism in my opinion. I found it much more refreshing than the opposite and much more in line with the slaying of the unrealistic and somewhat childish notions that everything always works out for all the Skywalkers and their clan in the end. In Star Wars, the Skywalkers and their friends balloon around the place fighting but there's very little real consequence for most of them. Maybe the odd death here or there but in part it's the entire galaxy that suffers due to this single family infighting. Let me make this really clear - the problem with Star Wars recently wasn't that the Skywalker group found themselves falling into these big galactic events and had to save the day, it's that the entire fate of the galaxy consistently rested on the whims of the Skywalkers. Imagine being one of the trillions of citizens that live in the Republic; you'd probably dislike the Skywalkers. You could be going about your business one day and for little reason outside of your control these Death Stars show up and blow up a planet to prove a point to a Princess. The Last Jedi and specifically the Rey reveal started to democratise this.
It did however acknowledge that the symbolism of the Jedi, of Luke Skywalker and the Rebellion itself was a source of hope in the Galaxy that allowed people to continue on in their lives in the same way that the symbolism of the First Order and the Sith and Darth Vader was a source of hope for Kylo and his minions.
This isn't to say that it didn't have problems - it did. There were tonal and pacing issues which threw things off on occasion but the overall was an interesting deconstruction of Star Wars mythos, of the need for establishment icons, of father figures, of the obsession with success and acknowledging the seedy underbelly of the galaxy is the puppetry of the war economy rather than the puppetry of the Sith or Jedi.
This film was directed by the man who directed the Fly and Ozymandias episodes of Breaking Bad. If people are going in expecting it to be a JJ Abrams Force Awakens type of by the numbers fan service machine then they need to change their expectations. Johnson is an auteur, not a Hollywood studio man.
