Project 4K77 and other restoration projects have been well known for quite some time. This is hardly going to be the first Disney has heard of them.
But once it's in the NYT, Bob Iger will surely read it. It may force the suits to release the hounds if just to make an example for anyone else considering similar restorations of Disney originals.
And that's the important part of their comment
(1) it’s a cooler scene when he shoots first. It’s raw and uncompromising and represents what the first two films were before the later films went in a different direction.
(2) The idea that the bounty hunter could miss by that much at that distance is just ridiculous. It’s immersion breaking.
It’s just one scene but it stands out. If it were food, you could say “it’s just one hair in your yogurt.” It still kinda impacts the rest of it.
It literally establishes that he will shoot first and ask questions later. It casts Solo in a completely different light than as simply a guy who is trying to survive and willing to skirt the law.
The original Solo is dangerous and reckless. The neutered one isn’t.
When I first saw Lucas' revisionist scenes in Mos Eisley back in the 90s or early 2000s, such as the CGI creatures outside the cantina and the Greedo/Han Solo incident inside, it was disillusioning.
Lucas didn't fix flaws in the original film. He jazzed up some scenes that didn't need it. He neutered one of the great flawed heroes of science fiction film. It would be akin to Francis Ford Coppola remaking the scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone coldly shuts the door on his wife by adding an audio or video edit in which the wife spits on Michael, thereby "justifying" the cold treatment.
Kudos to the teams restoring the original 35mm films, although I fear this article may trigger a heavy-handed response from Disney's legal thugs.