100% this.
If this is a different turning of the wheel, there's no reason to even use the same characters, locations, and basic story beats.
It's not a "different turning of the wheel" it's Rafe hijacking the story, written by Robert Jordan, to tell his own version of events. That's... a lot of things, but "good" is not one of them, IMO.
If he wanted to tell his own story in the WoT universe, just fucking do it, no need to practically plagiarize Jordans work to do that.