I'd still wholeheartedly disagree with that interpretation of the article.
The, "simulacra of simulacra of simulacra" bit about brands is just a quote from a novel centered on iterative dilution. It serves loosely as an example when someone physically feels aversion to something having become an over-iterated version of itself to the point where the latest version lacks any of the meaning and the inherent qualities that defined the original but only
feels like something without
being it:
Pollard wonders if Hilfiger’s blandness might be the source of his appeal: where most preppy clothes are freighted with meaning, Tommy allows you to look preppy without actually being that way.
While it makes that analogy of something having the same visual aesthetic of Star Wars without "being" Star Wars (which it nebulously never defines), the article itself isn't looking at Star Wars itself as a brand or a corporate machine. It's criticizing the iterations as being caused by the differences from stories driven solely as a single narrative epic, vs. those "filling space" in a wider Universe being the reason that they lack meaning. It posits that making "the Star Wars Universe" a larger setting rather than a single "Star Wars Saga" narrative only serves to make all Star Wars stories told less important. To which I have to say – That's Bullshit.
It asserts (incorrectly) that this focus on turning Star Wars into an aesthetic has come about as a result of the merger with Disney –
which is absolutely untrue, because Star Wars has been doing this exact sort of focus for its storytelling for decades. I'm sorry they didn't like Solo, but the way this film tells its standalone story isn't a new sign of the times, nor is it a change in the way that Star Wars stories are told as a result of corporate purchase by Disney, nor is it diluting (nearly) all Star Wars narrative solely into an aesthetic backdrop.
For all the ways that it whines on for paragraphs about how the stories being set in a larger universe is apparently causing them to lose their intrinsically held meaning and just turn into an aesthetic that serves only to fill space – It doesn't even manage that convincingly. It cites the literally the only other non-anthology Star Wars film "Rogue One" as its exception for having a strong self-contained story (which is essentially just a part of the main story Saga). They also don't address ANY other pieces of Star Wars media that've been made which handily show that just because you're connecting dots and telling stories in a sandbox doesn't make them inherently less-meaningful. Star Wars has operated this way with its wider storytelling for AGES and it hasn't prevented it from telling great stories, so it's clearly not the sustainable business model of storytelling that's the inherent issue here.
The whole article is nothing but a long-winded and vapid attempt to say that they personally didn't feel like Solo had a narrative purpose as a story to be told. They want everyone to believe that somehow them feeling that way about this ONE FILM means that all of Star Wars is doomed to be vapid and meaningless. Then they further posit that the reason for all of these things are because it's now a universe and not a part of one big Saga – which is again, just bullshit. The only point that's obvious here is that the author feels that Star Wars can only ever be singularly-universe-defining-plot-driven narratives, and isn't allowed to tell stories that're fun to enjoy with a character about some event that's legendary in the universe itself (The Kessel Run).
The whole article ought to just be called, "Why I personally only care about the Star Wars Saga stories" and it'd be far less inaccurately presumptuous about its claims. At it's core, it's the same
argument that Brandon Bird made on Twitter that I also
strongly disagreed with there. To make an analogy: The
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book are more lighthearted and ultimately have no impact on the events of the rest of the Tolkien Legendarium. However, the fact that Tolkien wrote that to flesh out an auxiliary part of Middle Earth doesn't mean that all other stories he was ever going to write from then on in that fantasy setting were doomed to be vapid and meaningless, because now he was clearly just interested in printing books on Middle Earth to make a living.
X 
) that tend to reuse familiar tropes. For the record, I like both Gundam and Star Wars, but they are derivative of themselves. It'll be interesting to see where Star Wars goes after the sequel trilogy is done. It definitely feels like Disney has been playing it safe so far - TLJ was really divisive, but it still had a lot of familiar elements, and the other stand alone films have focused on events or characters connected to the OT. It's understandable, given how the PT was received, but I do wonder how Disney'll fare with a story entirely disconnected from the OT.