If EP7 was terrible or even close to as bad as the prequels it would have been devastating for the SW brand. The stakes were insanely high. That's why Disney basically just remade ANH and played it as safe as possible
were they? Were the stakes ever actually high in any way?
Point here is that the prequels all made a fuckton of money on less than half of TFA's budget (245 mill versus 115 mill for ep 2 and 3), where the multiplier of budget to gross is basically 10x for ep 1, 6x for ep 2, 8x for 3, and 8x for TFA.
Technically speaking, and with massive changes in marketing budgets since then, TFA did not break the bank more than the prequels did, with ep 2 being the one that did 'poorly' when every other movie would be jealous of that multiplier.
There is certainly the narrative among SW fans that 'there were stakes', but looking at reply videos on youtube and the relative age of the people in it, which are people so young they literally weren't even born when Ep 1 started production, I don't think those stakes ever existed. It was just going to make a fuckton of money.
And TFA, being designed entirely around one shot at the end, doesn't really work that well as a movie to say that 'it earned it'. In the minds of fans who had that narrative, sure, but to others not so much.