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It's not about hatred, nothing as warm-blooded as that. For Amazon, it's cold pursuit of profit. Forget all the bullshit about Jeff Bezos being a YUUUGE Tolkien fan and the showrunners being big fans etc. That's publicity material for the trade weeklies. They want a big name production that will bring in new subscribers for Prime Video and make it profitable. If the show doesn't pull in the numbers, then it will be dropped (and forget about the five seasons). So they are making huge hay out of "first black dwarf! first black elf!" and all the rest of it to cast their net for the widest possible audience globally. Casual viewers will expect to see black/brown faces in the cast, or at least won't notice or care if there are. The appeal has to go beyond the fans and canon-knowledgeable, because that is not a big enough audience.
And they couldn't just write their own fantasy epic series, because that would have no ready-made fanbase or name recognition. They're competing with House of the Dragon, which is piggy-backing on Game of Thrones and its success. If they put up "Amazon presents 'Generic Sword'n'Sorcery' set in MadeupLand" against that, they'll sink like a stone (and not because they were looking downwards towards the darkness). They're trying to use the popularity of the movies and how that name recognition seeped into popular culture, hence why they bought the rights and why they're using 'Galadriel', 'Elrond', 'Hobbits/Harfoots' and so on.
(I begin to have my suspicions that Meteor Man might be meant to be Saruman, not Gandalf).
They're not one bit interested in being faithful to canon, they want to paste on the names of "you remember this person from the movies" to their generic fantasy story tropes. Not out of hatred, out of "what will fill our coffers with least effort? give the audience a story they've seen ten times before and which won't frighten the horses".
Sure. But on the other hand, they are also going out of their way to upset the people that they bring in with that. What good is a ready-made fanbase if you immediately drive them away?
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I'm not convinced. Time after time we see woke corporations take actions that seem more in line with ideology than profit motive; I believe "it's all about the benjamins" to be a comforting myth, told by people who want to think they can change things through good old fashioned capitalism rather than admit the cultural producers that dominate their society genuinely hate them.
It's not about money, it's about sending a message. We are in a war for the nation's very soul, and the creator class is best understood as combatants for one side.
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