Can we talk about the old EU for a while, I need to wash the taste of Woke Wars out
After previously mentioning
Splinter of the Mind's Eye, I decided to order a copy of it off Amazon to reread it when time permits and see what aspects my younger self missed when reading it the first time. If it wasn't too

fftopic: to do so, I've even be willing to share what I liked or disliked about it here once I finished it.
For example, the Jedi Prince books had the infamous "space whales" which was part of a corny moral message in the book about the environment and thus resulted in them becoming sort of a joke, however the whales themselves are just the local fauna of some water planet, while under Disney, Rebels introduces literal "space whales" as in "whales that actually fly through space and have hyperdrives up their tentacled asses" and in the end these magic purple space whales help Space Aladdin (after he tamed the space whale king) defeat Grand Admiral Thrawn...
Silly me, I thought the purrgils were one of Dave's crazy brainstorms. It wouldn't be too surprising if he based them on these more benign space whales and tweaked them to suit his fancy. Of course, I can't fathom how any living creature can fly through space at lightspeed without oxygen/air to breathe in what should be the vacuum of space and having its molecules go flying in all directions. But we can't have facts and logic get in the way of nuWars fans' precious purrgils, can we?
I remember after Thrawn's defeat people kept making up theory videos about his glorious comeback and how he would become a savage wild man on some jungle planet which would lead up to the Thrawn trilogy novels becoming canon, despite that said trilogy can't fit anywhere under new Disney since Chuck Wendig's novels are the replacement for said series, and the most Thrawn can ever amount to again is as a side-antagonist against Ahsoka and Ezra.
Most of this seems to come from the more diehard fans (who aren't strictly Disney) but have a such a ridiculous and delusional brand loyalty they'll stick around no matter what even if they were EU fans or OT purists, like the Wookieepedia weirdos (there's actually people who have been editing on there since 2005 if you can believe it) and gladly take anything up the ass as long as it has SW written on it. And yeah bringing back a memorable character only to be defeated at the hands tentacles of space whales makes me think he was better off not being brought into Disney canon.
I remember when
Rebels season 1 (or was it season 2) ended and there was a targeted Twitter campaign to have Thrawn be included as a character. I forget if the hashtag was #LetThrawnIn, #GetThrawnIn, or what, but the hard lobbying apparently paid off once Thrawn's inclusion was introduced. At the time, I told myself,
Be careful what you ask for fans - Disney may use him in ways you don't like.This was initially exhibited by fans not like the way Thrawn's eyes were animated, but that dislike faded fast simply because Thrawn was now recanonized in
Rebels.
Not knowing much about the EU, what little I read about Thrawn gave me the impression he was quite the badass antagonist character. To see him have such a campy, anticlimactic death in
Rebels seems like an insult to his character for those that liked the EU version. Why squander such an interesting, powerful character in such a fashion?
Worse yet was seeing Disney nuWars fans gushing over Thrawn's (apparent?) death scene like it was the greatest scene in franchise history. I agree with
@GeneralFriendliness so much so that I'm convinced Disney could claim a new Star Wars show was being released and still get rave revues even if the show turned out to be nothing but 20-30 continuous minutes of a test pattern with the SW logo superimposed.