I personally haven't heard anyone championing the narratives of the prequel movies in response to Rise of Skywalker, but I have heard people express a newfound appreciation of those movies on some level, and I get that. I think what people are appreciating is that the movies had a singular vision, tried new things, reached for some heights (usually stumbling along the way) and came from a place of -- for better and mostly worse -- genuine creative impulse. They even offered some pretty big innovations on a technical level (even just speaking in terms of shooting on digital film), akin to the first Star Wars.
I don't think many people are saying that they're good, though. I mean, you only have to browse my post history to see that I'm just about as anti-Disney as they come (in terms of their deeply unsettling grasp on our popular culture). On top of that, I don't think Rise of the Skywalker is a good movie. And as a viewer, I really don't like it for a litany of reasons. But, while I share a smidgen of newfound appreciation for the prequels for the reasons listed above, not a single movie produced by post-capitalist-dystopia Disney has been as narratively amateurish as the prequels. More than that, people are allowing themselves to forgot how shockingly incompetent the prequels were on basic filmmaking levels -- student-film-esque blocking (Jesus the blocking) and staging, lots of editing that is insanely rote and repetitive at best, banal framing and the famously poor dialogue and acting direction.
All of this got to mainstream cinemas -- all the admirable bits and the astonishingly bad execution -- because of Lucas' independence from the studio system. People forget that, though Fox may have distributed them and though the budgets may have been enormous, those are independent films. I understand and relate to missing the verve and even the fun weirdness that goes with that in light of our current Star Wars situation; it's literally the antithesis of what we have now -- the most blatantly studio-driven studio movies in film history, with even the most daring of the new Star Wars movies not being fully free from the ick of Disney's market-pandering touch. But let's also not forget that the prequels were staggeringly bad pieces of filmmaking. Twenty years later, it still kind of fills me with awe that products of their size are as sloppy as they are.
