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Notes -
A bit rambly, but I wanted to take it beyond race swapping to bring up what I feel is the elephant in the room, copyright.
Adaptations are not made equal. I think it's worth drawing a line between third party adaptations, and the copyright holders rubber stamping an iteration of their Brand for Current Year. Most of the complaints I see are about the second kind, new iterations from the same corp.
I find it especially understandable for people to loudly complain about adaptations they dislike for one reason or another for characters that are "ongoing" with a lot of entries in the franchise like Superman, because changes tend to bleed forward. Even if it's a reboot or whatever, I'd say that changes for a character constantly 'in print' by the same publisher are a little bit closer to changes done in the middle of a TV series than it is to someone else coming along hundreds of years later and copying the good bits from an old and complete story.
Complaints about a Dracula movie will tend to take the form of "This particular movie is bad", complaints about entries in long running copyrighted franchises tend to come with annoyance that a version that audience member liked didn't get made, and anxieties for the future of the franchise in the audience's lifetime. Let's take Bob, he likes James Bond but doesn't like Daniel Craig. As long as Daniel Craig was James Bond that means Bob's favorite actor does not get to be, other companies are NOT free to take up the reins and make a James Bond adaptation with Bob's favorite actor. They can make other spy things but to remain in the legal clear, they would be forced to change other elements that Bob does not want changed.
Another angle is the fear of George Lucasing/memoryholing of old versions, which is also much less of an issue for old public domain stuff anyone can legally print an infinite amount of copies of.
To extend this further, even in the absence of copyright, you'd have contentions over what symbols and stories should mean because you can only have one cultural consensus on anything - that's the meaning of the word consensus. Demanding that people not care about what others say is pointless, especially when some consensuses are rooted in what is moral or not.
Who are the Ghost Busters? A group of men who fight ghosts in the 1980s? That's not the answer some people want.
Who is Ariel? Is she a black mermaid? That's not the answer some people want.
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I actually fully agree with you here. I think it will be interesting to see what happens when Superman becomes public domain in 2034, and the Hobbit in 2043. It is rather unfortunate that copyright terms are so long that very little current pop culture will be available within our own lifetimes, though.
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