It's reasonably clear that
Star Wars would have been in some trouble if it had come out with anything like the original John Jympson edit, and in that sense it's fairly safe to say that
Star Wars truly was saved in the edit. (Though that's also not very surprising, as by all accounts it's not particularly unusual for a good completed film to have had a shaky first edit.) But it seems that all the evidence suggests that George Lucas was always unhappy with Jympson's editing and understood its problems, and that it was he who selected three professional editors including Marcia Lucas to work on a re-edit which achieved his high-level creative intentions and was closely and actively supervised by him, and in which he did some of the hands-on editing to boot. There doesn't seem to be much to support the idea that the (other) editors took
Star Wars out of the hands of a hapless George Lucas and bestowed on him a film which had been reworked beyond his own capabilities or vision, which is the usual "saved in the edit" claim, let alone that Marcia Lucas alone was largely responsible for that supposed feat, which is what was claimed at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49883758 .