Good point. It’s just that some weirdness arises as stories (or adaptations) begin to pass as originals, which I think happens by default. More effort to not take the thing at face value, more effort to asterisk every story you tell. Sanitizing is sorta like politeness in its (usually mild) degree of dishonesty. We tend to accept this level and sometimes praise it. Both also usually add slight bias towards the teller’s needs.
Even the idea of telling _the_ story of Cinderella vs _a_ story of Cinderella adds a not necessarily warranted suggestion of what people hundreds of years ago moralized and embellishes it with a kind of “time-tested” truth of humans.
The thing is, though, that there's no such thing as an "original" when we're talking about folkloric fairy tales. People give way too much deference to the first person who happened to get his own version of a story into print, typically imposing their own middle- or upper-class sensibilities onto it in the process. Those versions deserve respect as literary and scholarly works, but they neither require nor merit actual deference. Rich people using public domain stories as a vehicle for for-profit moralizing in the 18th or 19th centuries is not inherently more laudable than rich people using public domain stories as a vehicle for for-profit moralizing in the 20th or 21st centuries.
Agree there’s no or few “original” stories, and also that that’s not exactly something to bemoan. The quibble I’m making is that the longevity, whether intended by the tellers or not, tends to stick to the story in such a way as to lend not-necessarily-earned historical validity. The story is “time-tested” in an evolutionary sense not “time-tested” as a truth. That is, the story changed to survive, it didn’t hold up against time. Many of the stories take on the latter shine of certainty and legacy—as key selling points.
Making it more entertaining to contemporary audiences is fine or normal or whatever.
Even the idea of telling _the_ story of Cinderella vs _a_ story of Cinderella adds a not necessarily warranted suggestion of what people hundreds of years ago moralized and embellishes it with a kind of “time-tested” truth of humans.