Star Wars universe does have lasers of all scales and power levels.
Yet literally no one uses them well on a personal scale.
The Jedi (and Sith for that matter) imbue it with a power of magical stone, and then…use it as a saber.
To balance this stupidity, stormtroopers, clones and droids all use slow, non-continuous energy blasters. With actual lasers, they could insta-kill any Jedi, but they cannot, because otherwise the movie wouldn’t exist.
You’re right, though the melodrama and swashbuckling of Space Opera definitely lend themselves more towards the soft sci-fi/sci-fantasy end of the spectrum. Sort of, “if the characters and plots don’t need to bear much relation to the real world, why should the setting?”