Perhaps. But at the risk of channeling my inner curmudgeon, it does sometimes seem to me that modern audiences
do seem to find recasting more egregious than back in the old days, which I see as part and parcel with the whole modern obsession with "canon" and all that. Is it just me or do modern audiences take this stuff
way more literally these days, as opposed to when, say, you could recast Jane in an old Johnny Weissmuller TARZAN movie and nobody lost sleep over whether this meant that we in an "alternate timeline" or whatever.
And I'm not just talking Trek fandom here. I still remember being taken aback when the IRON MAN movies recast Rhodey and the internet howled in as though this had
never happened in the history of Hollywood before.
Does nobody else remember Valerie Hobson replacing Mae Clarke as Dr. Frankenstein's fiancee in the original Universal FRANKENSTEIN movies, or Ilona Massey replacing Evelyn Ankers as Dr. Frankenstein's grand-daughter in the sequels?
My point being that recasting has been going on forever, but it does seem to me as though modern audiences are more allergic to it than audiences in the past.
Not sure that's an improvement.