Supreme Leader Snoke's backstory makes absolutely no sense after Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. When Supreme Leader Snoke was introduced in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, he appeared to be the big bad of the sequel trilogy. Star Wars fans are used to treating the series as poetry, and he appeared to be the Emperor to Kylo Ren's Darth Vader. And then, in a shocking twist, the Supreme Leader was killed off in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker subtly explained Snoke's origin when Kylo Ren entered the Sith Temple on Exegol. There, he walked past cloning vats containing Snoke clones, proving the Supreme Leader was just the Emperor all along, a genetically engineered creature who presumably didn't even have a mind of his own. When Snoke said he had seen the Empire rise and fall in the novelization of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it was presumably Palpatine himself speaking through him. The core problem, however, is that it doesn't make any sense in light of the various tie-ins Lucasfilm published in the years they were producing the sequel trilogy.
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In an interview with Collider in 2018, Andy Serkis - who performed mocap for Snoke - insisted Snoke does indeed have a backstory. "We wanted him to have a great deal of mystery," he explained, but... JJ [Abrams] and I discussed it, and Rian [Johnson] and I did discuss backstories to him, where he came from. I've been asked to not shed anything, should we want to bring him back in any way." Serkis suggested the key to Snoke's backstory lay in the mysterious injuries he had suffered, the scars that had caused him to turn to the dark side. Snoke is "very vulnerable and wounded," Serkis explained, "He has suffered and he has suffered injury. The way that his malevolence comes out is in reaction to that. His hatred of the Resistance is fueled by what’s happened to him personally."
There are strong hints Supreme Leader Snoke was discovered by the Empire's survivors when they fled to the Unknown Regions, and according to the Star Wars: The Last Jedi Visual Dictionary they only survived there because Snoke had a group of Attendants/Navigators whose enlarged brains that are able to "process multidimensional calculations" that allow safe travel through the Unknown Regions. This explains why he was able to rise to power in the Empire, reconfiguring them into the First Order.
Lucasfilm has attempted to claim they had Palpatine's return planned all along, but Supreme Leader Snoke proves the lie. Even assuming the clues offered in Chuck Wendig's "Aftermath" trilogy are red herrings and actually point to Palpatine, none of Serkis' comments - nor the teasers in the various Visual Dictionaries - are at all relevant to the story told in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Far from Snoke's injuries being relevant to his story, they were visible in the cloning vats shown on Exegol, meaning he was created with them all along. There's absolutely no way this was the plan - and it simply doesn't work at all.