The word “Robot” literally means “Slave”. The first robot story was about people enslaving thinking machines and how it is just as unjust to enslave a sentient machine as it is to enslave a sentient human being.
In the end if something is self aware it doesn’t really matter if it is made out of metal or meat.
It’s fine to have a good-faith debate on whether robots count as “slaves” in the same moral or legal sense that people do. Our society’s current consensus on the subject is a firm “no”—we don’t grant rights to smartphones or vacuum cleaners or car assembly plants. That consensus also appears to hold true for most of the Galactic Republic (with some notable exceptions including L3-37).
But the Republic does recognize humans as intelligent beings possessed of free will and legal rights, so by their own society’s standards it should clearly be a moral abomination to breed human slaves for use as cannon fodder.
At a risk of going further down a tangent, aside from the hand-wavy plot device of making a robot uprising a non-issue in the SW universe, I always felt there was an implication that sentience, like life itself, is somehow connected to the Force, such that driods with their lack of connection aren’t among “all living things”. It’s basically religious mysticism seemingly back up by tens of millennia of in-universe observation, as opposed to religious mysticism in our real universe backed up by zero observation. Of course I also think introducing midi-chlorians was a particular low point of the franchise.
I’m a die hard original trilogy SW fan, and I have zero issues watching cartoons.
I wanted to like clone wars. Tried the series multiple times. Just couldn’t do it.
I identified with Luke and really the classic hero journey overall. The prequals and Clone Wars (the few eps I saw) didn’t give me anything to grasp on to emotionally: random bad guys, an unbalanced emo teenager, a bland yet trusty side kick, an army of clones and an army of robots.
One of my favorite things about The Mandalorian was how IG-11 was utterly unconcerned about his own continued existence. When Mando was trying to convince him not to self-destruct his response was basically “Bro, chill. I’m just a robot.”
Yup, I had him and the cannon material for IG-88 in mind as bearing out what is admittedly just my head-cannon.
The other thing I loved about that character was how they made him move. In Empire Strikes Back the little we saw of IG-88 made him seem stiff and clunky, but seeing IG-11 in action immediately makes it apparent that he can arbitrarily change which direction is “front” vs “back” so it’s literally impossible to attack him from behind.
We have not make a sentient AI yet so it’s not an issue. The Star Wars universe however should be grappling with this problem. That said, there’s a whole lot of slavery in general in the Star Wars universe and most people seem fairly blase about it, so it’s probably not as pressing of an issue as it would be in our universe.
Again, debatable. The Star Wars universe has plenty of droids that appear sentient, but then again my smartphone might seem like a sentient being if I showed it to someone from a society that had no knowledge of machine intelligence or programming.
Then why give them personality and emotions?
They have the appearance of emotion, sure. But it could just be a simulation of emotion to make them more appealing to their human owners.
Why give Alexa the ability to crack jokes or make Furbys cute and cuddly?
I’m not saying C3-PO and R2-D2 are definitely, unambiguously just simple appliances no one should care about. What I’m saying is that the Republic hasn’t reached a consensus that droids are sentient beings possessing basic rights and autonomy, but clearly has reached a consensus that humans are such beings. Therefore there’s no way they can claim moral justification for an army of enslaved human clones.
Genndy Tartakovsky’s 2003 Clone Wars series will always be my canon.
Sadly can only press the little heart once 
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