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In a way, I agree with you, but I also don't.See?
You're blessed with the skill to cross-examine the situation, if we go back even to the first game. The King is the one that leaves a letter for Donald and Goofy to find the keyblade (user). Which eventually leads them to the End of The World where they find the king who found the Dark Realm's keyblade.
Us (the audience in 2002) are seeing this as something sacred. That there are only two keyblades. Right. Right...? Wrong.
The ceremony ends up being pointless because as you said, Lea was given one without explanation. The keybladers belonging to the factions from Chi/Unchained-X, same situation it's no longer a novelty, quite literally everyone has one. So any validity expressed in previous games which would "gatekeep" a weapon like the keyblade virtually get tossed out and is made irrelevant (lmao).
So the concensus then becomes, if they can just retcon information on a dime, following events closely and speculation on what is possible gets thrown into disarray and you're playing knock out, drag out with the writing team trying to make sense of all the information that is canon in one game, but gets retconned in a later game...so, does that invalidate what you played/learned prior? Seems like it.
As Kingdom Hearts is an ever-growing franchise with no end in sight, I don't think there needs to be finality in some choices, let alone information given in one game - as they realistically can't. Like in the first Star Wars movie, they couldn't explain midi-chlorian, Order 66, why there are no other force users seen besides Obi-Wan and Darth Vader, what is in a lightsaber/how to make one etc. A lot of that information wasn't important to THAT story. The same applies to KH1. Union X, the keyblade war, Mark of Mastery etc. isn't relevant to KH1's story.
Does the treatment of keyblades post-KH1 affect KH1's story? Not so much. The story boils down to AT THAT TIME Sora was the only one capable of stopping Ansem. That is the condition that we played KH1 back in 2002 and the condition the games have left it a decade later. If it were revealed that a whole horde of keyblade wielders were around while Ansem was doing his thing, then it would mess up KH1 because I would keep thinking "why didn't they intervene?"
Now when I think about the Terra ceremony for Riku and Kairi being "touched" by Aqua and thus gaining the keyblade power... I think that was just Nomura's cheap way of connecting Terra/Riku and Aqua/Kairi for future games - which he ended up using. Those were more "oh look, they have some history, I knew it!" moments rather than actually considering the prestige of the keyblade in the world. I say that because we never know how Terra, Aqua or Ven get their keyblades (let alone if they had a ceremony). And quite frankly, no one cares because it doesn't matter to the story of this game. As ineffectively as Nomura did it, what was more important to the story (and to Nomura) are the connections between characters and Nomura executed that for Terra/Riku and Aqua/Kairi.
I'm not as opposed to all of the KHUX stuff (besides how hard it is to actually consume the story). I find that it actually adds depth to the lore of the series, where an entire civilization of keyblade wielders (and norm) was obliterated. It kind of adds hope to the current games because you actually see a long-dead race slowly rebuild with the light of children (like Kairi's grandma said).
As much as I don't like SO many keyblade wielders being around, the only one that genuinely bothers me and I think was a bad choice was Axel. I don't think he needed a keyblade to be a guardian of light. I think it would have been way more interesting for his character if he redeemed himself and Kairi detected that he had a special kind of light in him and realized he could be a guardian of light.