A couple of days ago, I realized I had a similar interpretation as this one to the wave of 90s/00s media reboots we've been seeing since about 2019. Already by virtue of their format, these reboots have to answer a very basic question: Why bring this piece of media back at all? Given how strongly situated they are in a given historical and cultural moment, especially as mediated by phenomena like genre, what pressing relevance could they possibly have to this historical-cultural moment we're experiencing right now? Unfortunately, the vast majority of reboots don't bother to answer this question. They exist only because some executive at Netflix or Hulu heard Millennials were kind of nostalgic for something they watched in the early 2000s, or that zoomers and Generation Alpha independently discovered for themselves this older media, and figured that funding a reboot was a much surer investment than funding a completely original show they'd almost certainly delist two minutes after they put it up. (Never mind they're just as likely to delist the reboot two minutes after putting it up.) The assumption here is that us, the consumers, will recognize this logic for what it is but watch anyway, just as unable to imagine a world beyond the present moment as they.
However, to all this we must add another set of concerns that the modern reboot also fails to answer. Many of them (but not all!) tend to go beyond interpretation and shoot straight for continuing the story (insofar as there is a story, anyway) right where the original run left off; often updating the timeframe to the present moment but leaving the characters themselves mysteriously unchanged by the passage of time, as though they could and should exist as both a memory we can experience anew as many times as we want and an unchanging commodity. Maybe the characters will throw a couple self-conscious winks your way every now and then to remind you that they are listening, they are one of us even as this whole rhetorical format betrays their...
Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that the continuity this narrative format introduces suggests that the reboot is in some way representative of whatever media it is that it's rebooting, and the danger there is...basically, a kind of historical revisionism: the reboot's desire to please, absent any understanding of why it's even doing any of what it's doing to begin with, will preclude any real acknowledgement of or honest engagement with all the shit the source material got away with back in the day (and honestly shouldn't have been able to get away with back then) but definitely couldn't get away with today. Obviously, I'm not asking they simply reproduce those faults/prejudices in the present. I just wish they'd give the matter some level of thought beyond "gesturing at the one character they had to cut because he got the show canceled the first time around (but not get rid of the other characters who were substantially worse than him????)" or "turn the fact that you're no longer doing it into material for the show itself, as though this does anything other than exacerbate the underlying problem."