Yes, the problem is the Force

I haven't seen Rise of Skywalker yet, but if this article in the SMH is anything to go by:

Star Wars suffers a disturbance in The Force – and it's The Force itself 

I have no reason to re-assess my view in my post about Last Jedi - the problem with the Star Wars universe is the lack of coherency in dealing with the nature of the Force through the movie series.

Which is a pity, because it was a clever part of the appeal of the first movie, as that opinion piece argues:

Back in 1999, George Lucas explained his thinking in creating The Force. "I don't see Star Wars as profoundly religious," he told interviewer Bill Moyers. "I see Star Wars as taking all of the issues that religion represents and trying to distil them down into a more modern and more easily accessible construct that people can grab onto to accept the fact that there is a greater mystery out there.”

A bit of this, a bit of that, all thrown in together, heated and stirred: religion soup, in other words. Or, if you prefer, a non-specific kind of spiritualism, free of structure, hierarchy, church or cant.

Back in 1977, Obi-Wan Kenobi explained Lucas' hocus-pocus thus: "The Force is what gives the Jedi his power – it's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together."

It was nice and vague, with a bit of something for everyone; the monotheists could read that as God, the mystics as an iteration of Brahman, the atheists as a poetic rendering of universal matter.

Yes, indeed.