For real. Omg you just reminded me of another absolutely stupid scene from the Netflix series, Another Life. That series' writing is so bad some people think it's on purpose.

So the ship needs to perform a gravity assist to avoid a cloud of dark matter or something. During the slingshot maneuver, they get so close to the star that they should've been absolutely vaporized. But you know what, fine. Flying unnaturally close to the star looks cool and the rule of cool applies. But their first attempt at the gravity assist FAILS and now they have to try again.

That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

Star Wars had basically no concept of fuel until like, one of the recent movies I didn't watch. Obi-Wan calls a TIE fighter "a short range fighter" in A New Hope. Luke flies an X-Wing all over creation; several are shown jumping to hyperdrive alongside other larger ships in Jedi, it's established that X-Wings are FTL capable.

are X-Wings capable of FTL travel for no reason?

Heh, that's actually the canon reason. Whereas TIE Fighters would launch from star destroyers like aircraft from a carrier, X-Wings would jump into hyperspace along with the frigates they were escorting.

The X-Wing is explicitly hyperdrive equipped. That's also part of why it has an astromech droid seat in it (R2), apparently so the droid can handle the jump calculations. A lot of later technobabble in the expanded universe expounded on this after the fact, but I presume this decision was made on a snap basis specifically so Luke could go to Dagobah in his cool ~~plane~~ spaceship.

You get to make hyperspace jumps yourself in your X-Wing a few times, fittingly, in the X-Wing games.

Back when they made the first movie they literally used WW2 fighter footage to design the final battle with the Death Star.