My personal take is that RoP is like “What if Sam, Merry, and Pippin’s children got all hopped up on sugar and had to retell the stories that they kinda remember Uncle Frodo writing down in his Big Red Book”.

So you get tangents for no reason and timelines that don’t really line up and decisions that make zero sense for the characters, because what your watching is an imaginative retelling of half-remembered bedtime stories from kids with zero focus.