It was clearly a labor of love, and the behind the scenes stuff shows that the cast and crew also thought highly of it. They made three extremely long movies that would have had to be MUCH longer if they cut nothing.
Stuff like the removal of Tom Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire made sense to me - narratively, some things have to be cut. I didn't particularly care for giving Glorfindel's heroism to Arwen, which saved no significant time and was essentially a tiny preview of Current Day nonsense. The dwarf-tossing jokes were dumb at the time and NOW are both dumb and extremely dated.

Based on what I've read, I don't think this crowd gives a damn about Tolkien or his work. This show seems to be at best mercenary (Bezos wanted his own Game of Thrones) and more reasonably described as an insult to Tolkien's work. But hey - I haven't watched it (or even read The Silmarillion) so maybe I'm wrong.