Cloaking devices were introduced in Episode I

no they were introduced in a TIE Fighter expansion, and if you're going to say there was a romulan-ass cloaking device in phantom menace i'm gonna need a wookieepedia link beacause i do not remember that shit

The tracking device makes hyperspace jumping a game of hopscotch. There's not really a point.

instead of a dumbass chase that makes no sense you can microjump some of the ships in front of the rebels, or call in more ships from somewhere else if there's time for the fucking b-plot.

Those rules are established in the books/supplemental materials, which aren't canon to the film series. The film-makers have no obligation to respect them. Episode 7 also breaks/rewrites the hyperspace rules.

throwing out the canon was the first bad decision jj and the other execs made, but even without knowing or caring about anything but the movies... all the fucky things disney movies did with hyperjumps means things like the falcon's escape from mos eisley didn't need to happen and the blockade of naboo couldn't have worked because the "can't go to hyperspace in a gravity well" was thrown out. the big fights against the death stars (hell the death stars themselves) were totally pointless because you could just destroy anything big and slow moving by hyper-ramming it, etc. indefensible on both matters.

It makes sense that people change over long time skips, and they did outline the rationale for his mindset changes in the flashback.

it's hack writing to have a change like that happen entirely off-screen, and the flashback is just luke about to murder an innocent person who hasn't done anything wrong yet because of a vision. how the fuck does luke get to that point in 20 years of whatever happened after the battle of endor where it's heavily implied that the rebels were going to win the war? it's totally unearned. (Also the state of galactic politics being completely unchanged from the beginning of a new hope is stupid and terrible but that's not rian's fault.)