publishers cannot have guts, it is just a corporation with a marketing team and executives.
If a book is edited then they have no right to sell it without putting it in big letters in the title. the same wat that when a book is translated, the translator name should be stated. it should be obvious that the translated work is not the original.
You are right, the best option to publish things that have aged poorly (or just perceived to have aged poorly) is to include a preface.

"This book was written in ___, some behaviours and attitudes present in this book are unacceptable now but were considered normal then. they are not a reflection of peepeepoopoo publishing, but are presented in it's original form here as the author wrote it."

Otherwise it is sugar coating history.

But a book that is old enought to have "aged" should be in the public domain, this life + 70 years is utter BS.