She greenlit both The Rise of Skywalker and The Mandalorian. Gave us both The Last Jedi and Andor. As far as I'm concerned she's succeeded enough and with enough frequency to say that without her approval and oversight we wouldn't have the best SW in the Disney Era.
Yeah, some of it's kinda sucked. But then George didn't exactly have a spotless record.
Right on the nose. There were people that thought the Ewoks would kill the franchise forever. The prequels would have never stood on their own as an original story without the original trilogy to support them. Lucas had far from a perfect record.
Sure, Kathleen Kennedy hired JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson, but on paper,
these were good choices. Abrams had genre cred and had recently revived the Star Trek franchise with great success. Johnson had Looper, which is masterful. Personally, I had apprehensions about Abrams specifically because of his revival of Star Trek, and those reservations turned out to be well founded, but on paper the Star Trek revival was very, very successful.
The fact that the sequel trilogy largely fails to live up to the standards that the fans had hoped for is unfortunate, but hardly a crime against humanity nor a death knell to the franchise, any more than Star Trek 5 or X-Men 3 were the end of those franchises. If a finger must be pointed somewhere, how about Kennedy's superiors at Disney who were so eager to cash in on their new investment that they greenlit a trilogy, complete with release dates, before having anything that even remotely resembled a story in place. Even then, the sequel movies were huge financial successes, achieving box offices that most franchises could only dream of.
And, as you said, she also green-lit the Mandalorian and Andor. And Rogue One, which is hugely popular. In fact, it is said that she was the one who made the recommendation that there should be no survivors from the Rogue One mission, which makes the story much more powerful. Ahsoka is my personal favorite of the bunch and season 2 is my most anticipated upcoming project. The Acolyte was flawed, but the premise was sound even if the execution didn't live up to its promise. No points off for green lighting that project. For me, the only complete failure of the Disney plus era, one that felt like a pointless cash grab, was The Book of Boba Fett.
Kathleen Kennedy is one of the most successful executives in Hollywood history, but she's only human. They can't all be winners, they can't all be runaway successes, and they certainly can't please everybody. The childish villanification of her over the years is both boring and tiresome.
