Probably the best example I can think of is Diane Duane reworking her Wizards series to make it modern-day, but there are others, including owners of a literary estate altering books left to them to make them compatible with current standards.
What do you think? Does it matter if it’s the original author or an inheritor?
I don’t really have a problem with the concept, broadly.
I’m not a published author or anything, but with a lot of creative stuff I’ve done I haven’t so much “finished it” as I have “sucked it up and decided to share it at a certain point even though I wasn’t 100% happy with it.” And I can’t imagine it’s much better for a lot of professionals.
But when someone says it’s to make the work “more modern…” That’s not a red flag, but it’s yellow for sure. That description can cover a lot of ground.
And it’s definitely a red flag when that version outright replaces the older one. It’s giving George Lucas.
Sometimes it seems to pass unnoticed. Many years ago, I was discussing details of Asimov’s “Foundation” online with another reader, and we found that I kept quoting passages he could not verify. In the end we realised that some time in the early 1980s, “Second Foundation” was stealthily edited, modifying a couple of data that were inconsistent with the two previous volumes and removing or altering a few phrases. While I had the original edition, he had the revised one and therefore was unable to find my quotes!