Odds are that fans were going to be talking about the final part of the Skywalker Saga for decades regardless of what was actually in it, but the situation we ended up with has left Star Wars fans in a very unique position. It isn't simply that Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker made a series of choices that not everybody loved, it's that, thanks to a leaked draft of a script, we have another, very different take, on how that story could have gone. And it would have led to a very different path, although the same ultimate end, for one Star Wars bad guy, Domhnall Gleeson's General Hux.
In Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, we learn that General Hux has become a spy for the Resistance inside the First Order. He doesn't sympathize with their cause, but instead he simply wants to see Kylo Ren fail so badly that he goes to extreme measures. In the end, however, he is discovered, and shot down with zero fanfare by Richard E. Grant's Allegiant General Pryde.
Director Colin Trevorrow's script for Star Wars: Duel of the Fates, would have ultimately seen General Hux die on screen as well, but in the version of the script that leaked online, it's revealed (via ScreenRant) that his method of death would have been self inflicted. In that version, Hux is no traitor. Instead, he finds himself realizing that defeat is inevitable, and so he goes to his room, to a display case which holds a variety of objects, including at least one vintage lightsaber, and he uses it to impale himself. Notably, the lightsaber he uses has a purple blade.
The Star Wars movies were in large part inspired by classic samurai films, and so the decision to see Hux perform a version of seppuku is perhaps quite fitting. It also, if nothing else, gives Hux a more noble send off, far more so than the one that he got.
The scene also reveals some interesting details about Hux. While he clearly hated Kylo Ren, the fact that Hux collected objects belonging to those that used the Force shows that the General may have simply been jealous of those able to use the Force.
The choice of weapon to use is also of note. There has only been one wielder of a purple lightsaber in the Star Wars films so far, Samuel L. Jackson's Mace Windu. While the script doesn't appear to state specifically that it is that lightsaber being used, the connection is almost certainly meant to be made by the audience. And of course, that lightsaber went out a window decades before with its owner. It's certainly possible it was picked up and has been bought and sold by collectors since then.
There are a lot of people who wish we had gotten to see Colin Trevorrow's Star Wars Episode IX. We'll never know what it really would have looked like. The final draft that we're aware of pre-dated the death of Carrie Fisher, and thus even if Trevorrow had remained the director, his movie would have gone through some changes before it hit the screen.
In the end, the stories of the galaxy far, far away are meant to by mythic anyway, so this can simply be one version of how the story could have gone.
