Exactly. Baffles me when eg Anthony Horowitz (whose Bond books I like) said that they boxed themselves in by the end of NTTD and that audiences wouldn’t be able to understand how Bond had come back to life. Well, we managed to understand that the rookie OO agent in Casino Royale wasn’t the Cold War dinosaur we’d seen in Goldeneye.
The same way people accepted that Affleck and Pattinson were both Batman even after seeing Bale either blown to bits or retire in The Dark Knight Rises. And while you could potentially argue that Keaton, Kilmer and Clooney were all supposed to be the same Bats, Bale definitely wasn't.

