Your story reminds me of an ongoing dispute in academic publishing, of transgender researchers asking journals to update their names on older articles in digital editions.

Many (or most, I'm not entirely up to date) academic journals have refused to do that, citing the possibility of confusion, especially for articles with lots of existing citations. (i.e. somebody sees an article cited in a footnote, searches for it, and can't find it because the author's name on the article has changed.)

Trans scientists say the journals' concerns about confusion are overstated, pointing out that searching for articles by title and publication name is not at all difficult.

But I guess this is an example of the narrative revision problem you write about.

It can't be easy.