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History always teaches, and most fans of Heroes 3 are conservatives themselves; otherwise, they wouldn't be playing a game from the 20th century.

But making a game based on the original Heroes 3 is possible. Which, naturally, would be much better than the original in many ways. The degree of changes can vary – from a global modification to small improvements/innovations to taste. But this is no longer Complete, but TE, WT, HotA... and there are not many popular mods that would only make small changes.
Which is understandable – if the authors have significantly reworked the game, then there is a kind of moral right to the resulting new game, but if there are few changes, then it seems that there is no moral right.
And then, if you have already started making some small changes, it is difficult to stop further – you want to improve and improve... and then, indeed, what kind of SoD is it, what you get in the end.
So it turns out that either a serious modification or an almost vanilla SoD.

This logic is fundamentally wrong.

In 1998-99, several excellent online games appeared at once, which are still being played today. Besides Heroes 3, these include Quake 3, Counter-Strike, and Starcraft.

And, for example, in Q3 and CS, the question of the original's canonicity never arose – in the initial versions from 1999, they played for the first couple of years, then switched to tournament modifications, and then to sequels with different gameplay. These games, in the course of their evolution, have undergone at least one full remaster (maybe more, I don't follow), and countless balancing changes have been made.

With Starcraft, it was a little more conservative, but even there, tournament mods firmly entered the practice closer to the end of the 2000s, and then Blizzard made a full remaster. True, the game balance was not changed there either, but only because it is excellent and does not require changes. If it did, they would have changed it without any problems.

A similar story was with Age of Empires 2 (also the late 90s), I don't know myself, but Sticky described it – there too, over time, a tournament mod appeared with balancing gameplay changes.

Everywhere, the general principle was the same – the truest version is not the canon from 1999, but the version that is adopted in sports competitions.

And almost no one complained that this was not true, that you had to play the canonical version, and not self-made mods by unofficial developers.

Heroes 3 should have followed the same path. And then TE, WT, and Hota would not have been needed. But history went a different way...