I was rewatching some of the reactions to luke skywalker in the season 2 finale of the mandalorian and some people were either expecting or hoping for Sebastian Stan to be recast as a young Luke since he apparently looks really similar to Mark Hamill and especially as Mark Hamill might not be physically capable of the work required at his age and de-aging costs a lot of money. 

but I wonder how different it might have been received if it was someone else instead, i'm sure many would be hyped regardless but I think part of what made that so special was that it really was as much of Mark Hamill as you could realistically get for that, de-aging body double and all, when everybody thought his time portraying him was done. and there are a lot of people who i've noticed feel attached to a certain actor as a character to the point where they think it would be offensive for someone else to do it. I feel like recasting usually skews more on the negative side when it happens as well, even with not as known characters like when people got angry that Rodrick got recast in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid films, tho that one might have been more of a satire.

and I don't mean recasting in the vein of Edward Norton to Mark Ruffalo in the MCU's Hulk where they only portrayed a character once in a film, but characters that have been played by an actor for so long that they are intrinsically linked to that character by default in the general public's eyes. things like Iron Man, Indiana Jones, Jack Sparrow, Harry Potter, etc. 

so i'm curious as to opinions on it. does it matter to you at all? should they just go for new iterations/reboots of said character instead like spiderman, batman, etc? i'm personally indifferent towards it, I don't really care about anything enough in specific to react in any way towards it and it's understandable as things always have to change eventually but I can see why it might depend on the circumstances for some. 

I would've preferred Sebastian Stan as Luke. The CGI on Luke's face was already really dated right when the episode aired and will just look worse over time.

I have no idea how Hamill still nailed a younger Luke's voice. I wonder if there was some digitizing of his voice? Mark's voice has gotten much rougher over the years due to smoking and just getting older.

In general, I'm fine with recasts, especially if the actors are too old.

I couldn't care less

One of the most useless things to be concerned about

If it wasn’t Mark Hamill people would’ve shat all over it, because Mark Hamill is Luke Skywalker. And not anybody else. I for one have never heard of this Sebastian Stan, so it would’ve been like “Huh who’s that?” if it was someone else. This was better. And I agree, I would be one of those people doing the shitting. I don’t like actor swaps in general, whether it’s Star Wars or some random tv show or whatever. If you’re just going to use someone else in a role, you might as well just make a new character. This is also why using the likeness of Peter Cushing was good in Rogue One. If they didn’t, they’d better just make a character that wasn’t Tarkin. Obviously, this is different for movies where a much younger or older version of a character is used. Ewan McGreggor as a younger Obi-Wan Kenobi for example is fine.

All depends on why the character is being recast: I don't have any problem if it's for a younger version or something of the like (as long as the new actor is not too different in appearance). But if there's nothing to justify that decision, then I think it's better to just switch the character for a different one, because it can be a real damper otherwise.

And I have, in fact, a quite illustrative example in the Lars von Trier's never-finished trilogy consisting of Dogville and Manderlay: I rewatched Dogville just to have it fresh in my mind before watching its sequel and, when the next day I saw that the main character didn't look even remotely close to the one in the first part (in spite of supposedly being the same person), I felt completely off the movie. And the worst part is that this director has made other trilogies that are linked by their theme, rather than their stories or characters, so why on Earth didn't he just do the same here? Maybe it was a last minute issue and they couldn't change the script or something like that, but heck, I didn't enjoy the movie near as much as I could have just because of that shit (the movie is good, by the way, which only makes this situation worse).