the one in FR seemed pretty staid at least, it isn't a living entity because it's supposed to take on a life of its own after the fact. Which is why any kind of shift in the world undergoes this kind of scrutiny. It doesn't help that WotC has been pretty up front that these changes have little to do with any artistic impulse, it's to make D&D more marketable, or at the very least, stop it showing up as the butt of so many clickbait articles.
It’s interesting you say the FR isn’t a living entity, because I have the opposite impression. I freely admit I’m only an occasional visitor through cRPGs and the odd novel and comic book, but Faerun for one seems to have undergone massive changes as well as over a hundred years’ of in-game time. Of course, we know that the out-of-universe explanation for many of these shifts are updates to game versions including updated lore, rulesets and responding to the changing social context, but while some changes have been more successful than others, that the changes are in service to the D&D game rather than internal artistic logic doesn’t seem to me a necessarily bad thing given that’s mainly what the setting is for. The trick for the developers is to try to give in universe rationales for changes that (okay) have actually been made for other reasons, which personally I find kind of fun.
I was referring mostly to the cultures of the Forgotten Realms, but if you're referring to the in-universe edition reboots, I don't see how they've really changed the world a great deal, maybe it was more pronounced in 4th edition, the edition I paid the least attention to. Looking at any corner of the world I don't think a great deal has changed in the cultures involved, all the cities and their people have the same characteristics. Apart from moving some deities around or hand waving some of the mechanical aspects of magic, the setting still exits with the same medieval-ish fantasy technology and culture, with certain regions taking on aspects of different time periods depending on which genre the game wants to veer into.
Despite its catastrophic influence on the setting, I've learned more about the Spellplague and the Dark Weave from these forums than I ever did reading about the setting directly from the source.
Of course I could be wrong, but I still haven't seen a lot of evidence to the contrary.
I haven't read any of the books, so I have to assume their influence on the setting is minimal apart from the occasional cameo in adventure modules.
As for working backwards from a publishing initiative to its in-universe justification. I read comic books where this sort of thing happens regularly, if you have a good writer it can be satisfying, if not, well the term retro-active continuity was coined there for a reason. I'm afraid I don't think the stable of writers working for D&D right now are capable or care enough to work these changes into the narrative. As was mentioned in maybe another thread, its coming in flavor text, blurbs, and errata.
