^ Issue with the old Canon was Lucas himself used to disregard it. But they actually kept the Canon of 6+ series worth of Canon he worked on with TCW which is a lot of Canon for Disney Lucasfilm to abide by as it is.
And with all the Post-ROTJ Legends stuff it would have been pretty impossible to do Episodes 7-9 sticking with the Legends Canon.
But still to be perfectly fair they are respecting Legends by bringing characters like Thrawn back, and even getting the original writer to write him again.