Well I was 14 when the Phantom Menace came out and I have always liked them. Less then the OT, but I never really got the hate, I mean I wasn’t blind to their faults as this thread from a decade ( 
) ago shows. But I thought they were good.
Besides the younger generation growing up, the Prequels got vindicated. They did some very extensive world building which spawned a lot of great expanded material. And of course the Sequel trilogy very deliberately tried to avoid the “mistakes” of the prequels and ended up inadvertently making them look better. No boring politics, no world building, so what the hell happened to the Republic and just WTF are the First Order and the Knights of Ren? Don’t explain whats supposed to be mysterious led to “somehow Palpatine returned”.