Just to provide some important context from the paragraphs preceding the quotes in the OP to make it clear how Crawford laid out the issues very clearly:
“One of the reasons why this word ‘edition’ is loaded is currently it has two different meanings,” said Wizards’ game design architect Jeremy Crawford at the event. “In broader publishing, edition is a pretty neutral term that simply means ‘a new version of the book.’ Now, in D&D the term has over the years gained much greater weight, because the term also came to mean a new version of the game.""
"Those editions — those new versions of D&D — have always been fractious for the larger D&D community. Folks like to keep using the rules that they’re familiar with, and with every new edition of the game Wizards has left a significant portion of its player base behind. For a ready example, look no further than the transition to fourth edition that took place in the early 2000s. The transition from D&D 3.5 to fourth edition was a clean break with almost nothing but lore shared between the two systems. That huge change greatly splintered the player base, giving rise to Paizo’s Pathfinder and other upstart competitors. The fact that fourth edition played more like a tabletop miniatures game than a traditional RPG didn’t help matters at all, but the damage to the larger brand was not fully undone until 5th edition’s incredible surge in popularity prior to the COVID-19 pandemic."
"For those reasons, Wizards said, 5th edition is here to stay... even though its core rulebooks are changing."
"“We are releasing new editions of the books,” Crawford emphasized. “We are not releasing a new edition of the game. And so that, I think, is a really important distinction — that it is still 5th edition, but yes, we are releasing revised versions of the books, which anywhere else in the publishing world would be called new editions.”"
"The proposed solution, then, for differentiating between 5th edition and what comes next? To append the year of publication to the end of the core rulebooks’ names. That way, Wizards said, going forward there will have been a Player’s Handbook (2014) and there will also be a Player’s Handbook (2024). While they are fundamentally different books, Crawford said, they can both be used to play the same game. And, most importantly, they will both be compatible with every other 5th edition book that has come before."
"“The other books aren’t changing,” Crawford said. “These are new versions of these three books. It’s the same game.”"
