Watto and Nute Gunray weren't portrayed as buffoons, though. Jar Jar had the double-whammy of not just referencing an ethnicity, but doing so in a gratuitously insulting way.

(Granted, Watto, being a slaveowner, was certainly not a sympathetic character either, but at least he behaved reasonably enough in the context of the story. A shrewd businessman, but not greedy or duplicitous, you know? At least Lucas stopped short of the really offensive antisemitic tropes.)

Rastafari. Lucas has a bad habit of including a little casual racism in a lot of his works. Less a matter of because hateful and more a matter of being old and out of touch with certain matters.

I feel like it was just because he was trying to make them sound exotic/foreign/alien and wasn't imaginative enough to make up accents from scratch.

There’s also “Small Round” and the Indian banquet from Temple of Doom and the Jewish stereotype Watto from episode 1.

There's also the hyper-Japanese Nute Gunray from the same movie. Lucas was pretty equal-opportunity in his cultural appropriation, LOL!

I also don’t buy that as being the difference between the two. Doby was from a slave race and treated as weird for not wanting to be a slave. That’s way worse than what Lucas did.

Yeah, but that made Dobby a more sympathetic character. There was nothing like that for Jar Jar (especially since the only people that treated him badly were other Gungans, and it was earned). Dobby was oppressed and brainwashed; Jar Jar was just [very convincingly pretending to be] a clumsy oaf with a stereoptyical accent, which basically just makes him an insult to that ethnicity.

Also, keep in mind we're talking about how people feel about the characters themselves, not how people feel about the creators' purpose for writing them that way. So yeah, 100% agree that Rowling was way more problematic than Lucas, but that doesn't mean Dobby was more problematic than Jar Jar.