Abrams recently admitted that if he had been the one to direct Episode VIII,
he would have done things differently (what specifically, we don't know).
Although the two directors had deep conversations about the second chapter in the Sequel Trilogy, that doesn’t mean that they totally agreed on every point or that J.J. Abrams was a fan of everything Rian Johnson did. Ultimately it was Rian Johnson’s film, and at his BFI talk, Johnson also said that he wanted to make a movie that stood on its own and succeeded on its own merits, while also taking the trilogy into account.