I direct your attention to the article which appeared in this week's Comic Shop News, #2012, March 11, 2026. It's not available online, so those of you who still read comics will have to pick it up at your LCS. The folks who publish CSN these days are quite a bit younger than I am and approach the matter from a different perspective, but I agree with their general conclusion. They seem to think of "continuity" as "one enormous web" which encompasses all titles in a given universe (which they define as "one masssive, unified continuity across and entire publishing line," which I interpret to mean line-wide crossovers and the like). They go on to differentiate that with "selective continuity" which, the way I interpret what they're saying, is what I think of as "continuity."
"What fans increasingly respond to is selective continuity. Worlds where internal logic is respected. Where character growth sticks. Where consequences matter inside that specific story space. It doesn't have to connect to everything. It just has to be consistent with itself." I agree with their ultimate conclusion, that continuity does matter, but we get ther via differnet paths. The article is worth reading, but too long to transcribe here. I suggest that you seek it out.
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"Selective Continuity" is also a pretty good descriptor of how history is taught and understood.
True dat.
While I think that continuity does in fact matter, I also think that it is difficult to maintain as the years accumulate, and perhaps for that reason Marvel and DC both seem to have embraced a very loose form of it - almost a "sliding window" model of continuity, as events, worldbuilding and even characterization seem to be treated as having a shelf life of perhaps around fifteen years (real time).
It is not entirely out of choice. Behavior and social expectations change fairly quickly these days, and it would be weird to attempt to fit 1940s or 1960s values and expectations into present day situations and characters.