Dragon Ball has become much like the Pokémon anime nowadays where it exists only to sell merchandise
And yet you keep coming back.
If Disney had the balls to replace Luke Skywalker in Star Wars
"The balls to replace Luke Skywalker." Disney alone actually
returned Luke to the franchise, as they did his character contemporaries, even if they're no longer the central protagonists. The reality of the matter doesn't quite match your assessment.
Digimon did the same thing and those franchise's sales haven't faltered because of it.
They did, actually. When Digimon was producing a new series annually, ratings were so low on the latter few series that it basically stopped the franchise from producing a new series annually.
Ratings aren't the sole metric for those series. I liked Frontier, I liked Xros Wars, and I probably would have liked Savers had I ever seen the full series, but the point is that franchise's sales
did actually start to falter when they moved away from the original protagonists, not that the correlation is direct, or 100%. And, not for nothing, what are the franchise's most recent productions? Six films, soon to be seven, starring whom? The original cast.
Everything nowadays has become too sanitized and kid friendly to the point where they choose to ignore the demographic that grew up with them over the years
"I am older than I was when I first got in to these series and my tastes have changed and I don't know how to process that, so I'll just blame it on buzzwords like 'sanitized' and 'kid friendly' and them not catering to me specifically."
Not a valid argument. Never a valid argument.
Dragon Ball needs to be put out of it's misery at this point
If Dragon Ball really brings you joy no longer, then, again, move on. There's nothing to be changed by ranting here about how much you hate the franchise at this point, as you've done repeatedly over an extended period of time.