I've been thinking about this a lot lately lol. I actually do really enjoy The Force Awakens and especially the characters it introduces (such gaiety! such promise! shame they never actually did anything with the solid start they had). But the core plot thing is so ridiculous.
Like, it'd be bad if it were just Death Star 3, but instead they had to be like.. this one's bigger and destroys several planets, at a range of ~12 kpc (Ilum is in galactic grid square G-7, Hosnian is M-12, each square is ~1.5 kpc on a side). And the branching off of the beam to each individual planet in the Hosnian system is distinguishable to the naked eye in real time to viewers on Takodana (grid square J-16), ~7.5 kpc from Hosnian.
In the novelization they tried to explain this nonsense, so now there's new bullshit lore about how they're transforming a form of "dark energy" called "quintessence" into another form called "phantom energy" which then travels thru "sub-hyperspace" to ignite a planet core in a "pocket nova", with it being visible in real time across the galaxy via what official loremaster Pablo Hidalgo called "some weird hand-wavy hyperspace rip".
And like... it's supposed to be impactful when they do that but we've literally never seen those planets or the people on them ever? Literally the first we see of them is them being destroyed. In A New Hope we hadn't seen Alderaan, but at least there were emotional stakes - it was the home planet of one of the main characters, and they were trying to use the threat to her people to get her to betray her comrades. I think there's one woman who's shown on Hosnian Prime when it's being destroyed as tho we know who she is but other scenes with her were cut or something iirc?