The portrayal of Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi was also missing (at least on the surface). Instead, this was an aged Luke, full of regret and living like a hermit on Ahch-To.
Not only was Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which stranded Luke on an island in the first place. This was just one of many criticisms about Luke, continuing the idea of the character being underpowered in Star Wars movies versus the more overpowered Luke in Star Wars Legends, and, of course, with Luke cutting himself off from the Force being so shocking a decision to contemplate.
And yet, for all Luke chose to remove himself from the Force, The Last Jedi depicted him as more powerful than any other Star Wars movie, and indeed stronger than in The Mandalorian as well, despite that essentially showing Luke at his peak. It's true that he was overall stronger as a Jedi there, but his most impressive abilities come in his most divisive outing, and include cutting himself off from the Force. The use of Sever Force, the ability necessary to do this, hasn't been explored much in canon (though it was something used by Kanan Jarrus). For Luke in particular, though, this was an impressive feat.
The son of Anakin Skywalker, aka the Chosen One, Luke has an incredibly high midi-chlorian count; he is super attuned to the Force, and so to tune it out is a near-impossible task. Luke cannot shut himself off from the Force completely, as the novelization of The Last Jedi expands on it, showing it still came to him in dreams. Nonetheless, that he cut himself off at all shows a mastery of the Force itself, and an ability greater than any he'd shown since given the level of difficulty involved, which is more so than learning to use the Force in the first place. In Legends, Sever Force was an even more powerful ability, because it could be used as an offensive technique, with a Jedi using it to cut another Force 's connection. It was a rare and uniquely powerful ability, and while that doesn't translate into canon directly, it does further evidence just how strong Luke was to use it.
Luke's reconnection to the Force later in The Last Jedi then led to his other most impressive display of power, the Force projection Luke used against Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) to allow the Resistance its escape. Based on the similarly powerful and rare Doppelgänger technique from Legends, Force projection, while recorded in ancient texts, has only been used by Luke in Star Wars canon, and it's such an astonishing display of power and Force connectivity that many in the galaxy believe it a myth. Luke's Force projection brings together the two strands of the Force - Living and Cosmic - in a means not too dissimilar from becoming a Force Ghost, in that energy from the Living Force (which is the energy of life; active and present) goes into the Cosmic Force (which is essentially everything else; a wellspring, or the history of the Force and its future).
The effort it takes to create a Force projection is what leads to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, nothing quite matches the Force abilities shown in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
