The point is that if you don't care about the basic internal consistency of your setting, it makes the setting worse.

For example, I don't begrudge the Fast and Furious series doing completely dumb, physics-defying shit with cars, like jumping them between skyscrapers. That's fine, because they never tried to be realistic in the first place. But you will notice that their cars don't suddenly transform into planes and fly (they may now, I haven't seen all of these movies, but the first few I was forced to sit through did not have that at least), because the movies are about car stunts and not planes. You don't see cars just do these jumps while not going fast. Because that's how car stunts work, you go fast and jump a thing.

In the same vein, Star Wars doesn't need to be overly realistic. And it absolutely isn't. I could complain about the prequels and how their depictions of shields are entirely inconsistent and and how it's dumb that Bobba Fetts ship has blasters that explode around the ship of Obi Wan a million times and never hit anything, but I wouldn't do that because I realize those are just meant to be cool visuals in a movie. The difference between these cool visuals and planes in space is that planes in space violates the basic rules they established for their setting. You are right that Star Wars doesn't have to be smart, but they should try to adhere to their own internal consistency as it has been established over all of the previous movies, games etc. It's not like it's hard to do either. Just make them look like torpedo bombers instead, or whatever.