It was pointless. E9 is a completely different storyline with a new bad guy, new objective, new mission, etc. E8 was ignored and it's main points changed/fixed.
Looking at the trilogy, it's pretty much 3 separate movies without connection due to the weakness of the middle episode. Of the 4 main stories lines of E8, literally 2 were pointless (the slow space chase and Finn/Rose arc). You can cut them out with no impact on the trilogy. E8 was CoT bad.
The problem with E9 is that it wasn't set-up in anyway by E8. I don't want to get into spoilers, but Rey, Luke, Pappy, Ben, all went in different directions in this movie.