If they want to explore that time period in detail, and there are a lot of signs that they do, they can't just say that "historical details were lost". Because in contemporary materials, it isn't history, it's modern age.
When saying "strict continuity", I didn't mean that the continuity is free from problems. There are inconsistencies, but if they didn't care about the continuity, they wouldn't retcon them at all. The retcons at least wrap it up and reduce the number of loose ends, and this is the right direction to take, even if they don't totally succeed in it. Inconsistencies here and there are inevitable due to the amount of existing material, but with the introduction of the Holocron, the problem was reduced.
So, if you don't like the fact that the genders were canonized,