Outside of hard core SW fans, most of the people I know who have seen it were less impressed than the previous two releases, which correlates to what we see with the RT scoring.
most non-hardcore people I've talked to genuinely like the movie
In places where anyone can register and vote/score the movie (as many times as they want), the scores aren't great. RT has a score in the fifties, metacritic is about 50%.
But in all the movie industry polls that actually poll people coming out of theaters, like Cinema Score (A rating) and comscore (5/5 stars), the movie is doing very well with audiences. That's a big disconnect.
Birth.Death.Movies has a nice breakdown of the disconnect by looking at the review data. Curious that 60-70% of the bad TLJ reviews are coming from newly registered users. And then like a third of those new users deleted their account after posting the TLJ bad reviews.
I am not trying to invalidate anyone's opinion of TLJ or say you're bad/dumb/whatever if you didn't like it. I am sure that there is a population of folks who either didn't like the movie or were disappointed with what they got/saw, but it does seem like it's possible a small minority of those who didn't like it are causing problems on some of the internet review sites.
I'm not trying to say that it's all fake and everyone loves the movie, but it wouldn't surprise me if the truth was somewhere in the middle.
I read that an ALT-RIGHT group has claimed responsibility for these bots. They cite issues with Disney, Kennedy and Hidalgo pushing a feminist agenda and some other random homophobia. They also reference reviews that their bots posted to other films (Weight of Water) instead of TLJ by accident.
Now, this could be some idiot claiming credit for something that happens as normal, but... I definitely don't take RT at their word saying "we weren't hacked" since all they really have is their reputation.