From what I gather, the question is basically like this:
1. If we consider a setting like The Forgotten Realms, then each edition of D&D coincided with massive events changing the fundamental reality of the setting, such as the spellplague, the restoration of the goddess of magic, and so on. Therefore, different editions of D&D are not merely new ways to approach abstracting more or less the same worlds, they in fact map to different times in different settings that, internally, ran on whole new rules (like if our own world experienced a supernova so massive it adjusted the fundamental laws…