Doing a "soft edition change" like this one allows them to update the ruleset to a more modern audience and lets them fix mechanical quirks/problems with the base game without losing a huge chunk of their fanbase.
Agreed this is certainly the idea, but we'll see how well it works. There are already folks dividing 5E into pre-Tasha and post-Tasha, and we're still two years away from seeing what the 2024 revision will actually look like (there are just lots of hints). There was also a poll here a while back that had a decent number of folks undecided on whether they would "upgrade" or not - and some had already decided against it!
That said, unless they make some serious mistakes with the 2024 revision, I doubt the trajectory of the current changes will alienate
huge numbers of players. But I think it's very likely it will eliminate some current 5E fans, which is still a shame.
"Revising history" would be if they used errata to get rid of the older versions of the Core Rulebooks.
Wizards clearly made the "errata" content changes late last year (to the PHB, DMG, Volo's, etc.) because they didn't want the older material to appear in the printings picked up by brand-new fans. In other words, they want newer fans to get a different impression of those rulebooks from earlier printings. It's hard to believe they wouldn't prefer newer fans think the current text was always the way it was.
Well, aside from the fact that I'm not promising anything, it might take a few years, or at least a period in which "classic elements" are de-emphasized. But things come around, and one thing that seems consistent is a "back to our roots" cycle.
The thing is, "back to our roots" tends to happen only after a property veers so far away from said roots that it starts losing core fans, and the company feels the need to tap into nostalgia to get them back. 5E itself, of course, is one major example of this (following the much more modest attempt seen in the Essentials line), but there are others (such as DC's New 52 reboot gradually reversing itself, from DC Rebirth through Infinite Frontier).