Now we live in this shitty era where you have to play Fortnite, read the books, and the comics just to make sense out of the shit that we see in the movies that went unexplained. So not only are the movies bad, but they expect you to read all this shit to keep up with it. Of the new books for the new canon, I've read the Aftermath Trilogy (DON'T! JUST FUCKING DON'T!), Bloodlines (which was...ok), the Ahsoka book (which was again...just ok), Dark Disciple (which was a carry over from the old canon and unproduced Clone Wars scripts so it doesn't really count), and some of the Marvel comics (Main Star Wars and Darth Vader start off good and then taper off when identity shit comes into play and the Leia series was dull).
What's even worse is that the ancillary Nu-Canon materials' attempts to flesh out the films is almost always immediately trampled underfoot by on-screen retcons.
The shitty
Poe Dameron comic? Retconned into oblivion thanks to TLJ showing him as a reckless hothead disobeying Leia when they absolutely
do not have that relationship in the comics (as well as TROS changing his origin to spice runner and making him oblivious to jet troopers he already fought in the comics).
Claudia Grey's eye-rollingly stupid background info on Leia for her
Bloodlines novel? All changed, thanks to TROS' revelation about her abandoning Jedi Training out of fear for her son (even TLJ got partially retconned because Rian Johnson claimed that Leia never had any Jedi Training and that her Super Leia feat was just an instinctual maneuver).
The Ahsoka novel? Blissfully retconned by Filoni himself, with just about every detail about the Siege of Mandalore--which was already sketchy in the first place--now retconned to support a season finale that somehow manages to make even
less sense.
And the novelizations? Fucking forget about 'em. Both Alan Dean Foster's TFA and Jason Fry's TLJ have background info on Snoke being an ancient archivist who collects Force artifacts...only for TROS to waltz along and retcon him as a fucking clone. And then you have my favorite one of all, which is the fucking
atrocious Kylo Ren comics, which not only rewrote Kylo to have not actually killed Luke's students even though
that's what TLJ deliberately tells us, but also gives Snoke autonomy as an individual person who emotionally manipulates Kylo into turning against the other Jedi. And this isn't even getting into all the ways that the films contradict
each other.
Even if you read, watch, and consoom everything in canon, you have to make a wealth of personal concessions to reconcile all the ways that it doesn't mesh well together, and even with that, it's all to link together a collection of stories that range from mediocre to outright terrible.
Which is funny, because I'm actually one of those mouth-breathing lore fiends who actually
does like to read everything...I read
Crimson Empire, Chewbacca, Invasion and
Rogue Planet to get the full context of what was happening in NJO. I read all the old 80's Marvel issues to get the rundown on Lumiya before reading LOTF. And I know that when I'm done with FOTJ, I'll probably go back and read all of the novellas, short stories and comics pertaining to the Lost Tribe of the Sith, just because I find them so interesting. Even if the quality of the individual stories aren't that great, I can still appreciate the ways that the continuity flows together and makes sense, and it's rewarding as a reader to see how everything comes together. Sure, there's a retcon or two along the way, but when the good stories outnumber the bad, it's a small price to pay when keeping up with everything. But that incentive doesn't exist with Nu-Canon, because on top of
all of the stories being complete fucking trash, they aren't even consistent in terms of continuity to
warrant reading everything.
Also, this "Read Everything If You Want The Full Scoop" Method that Disney/LFL are currently employing with
High Republic is already killing them. On top of places like r/StarWars barely acknowledging that project's existence, the only posts you'll find on it are baffled outsiders asking what order they have to read this shit in.
The only traction
High Republic is getting on the official Star Wars Reddit is apathy at best, and confusion at worst.