Yeah, it's kinda funny how the supposedly more fantastical Star Wars has no really out there things like time travel or alternate universes.

It wasn't a retcon, though, it was conceived from the beginning as an alternate universe.

Disney already wrote off 90% of what was canon at the time and turned it into "legends" when they bought rights. They can do it again.

Honestly, just move away from it in the timeline. Legends canon has a a few thousand years to work with, and one of the funny bits about Star Wars is that even though the Old Republic and New Republic exist extremely far apart, the vibes and aesthetics are all fairly similar. And although I would say that Andor is proof you can do cool things with a Star Wars background, at its heart SW is a conceptually fairly simple. Young person with the help of wise wizard and plucky band must master his powers to face down the evil tyrant. Now, is that the OG trilogy? Prequels? Sequels? LoTR? The Matrix?

JJ at least got this part, the problem is you have to add enough flavor to the story that it doesn't feel like a complete rehash, which JJ failed at with TFA even if that was the closest the sequels got. No idea how Rian made it out of the pitch meeting, pretty clear he had no interest in making a SW movie, and basically just went "never mind all that" to TFA. And then JJ has to land the plane that was basically rebuilt into a railcar midair, and it went about as well as could be expected.