I Hate Alternative Universe Fanfiction

Hot take.
I don’t like fanfiction AUs.
Now what am I talking about exactly?
In the parlance of the fanfiction community, “AU” means “Alternate Universe.” It is a work in which the characters of the original IP are placed into a completely new setting unlike their original one. Not to be confused with something like a crossover or a bit of portal fantasy. The cast of Dragon Age: Inquisition may have dropped through a magic rift into the world of Mass Effect, but they’re still ostensibly “from” their original universe.
No an AU is a rebuilding from the ground up where our characters are born into completely and totally different circumstances. Instead of complex political plights and dragons, they’re running a coffee shop.
I, personally, cannot stand AUs. They are my least favorite form of fanfiction.
And most of this is the perfidy of being a writer myself.
We are so shaped by our environment as people. There are a lot of things ingrained into our person inherently, but the rest is a consequence of external pressures. You change those external pressures, you change significant elements of a person. If you turn Daenerys Targaryen from the Mother of Dragons to a barista in upstate in New York, she’s not Daenerys, anymore. You’ve stripped away large parts of what makes that character who they are.
So at that point, where does it actually sit within the greater definition of fanfiction? If we’re stripping characters away from their original setting and story, it’s no longer just filling in the gaps in the narrative. It’s completely reconstructing a new narrative around a character concept. Because, again, if we’ve removed a character so thoroughly from their story, they’re no longer that same character. They are merely the bones of that character left behind with new meat and sinew strung on top.
You cannot recreate the exact same character in a different setting. There will always be too many fundamental difference. If it’s not the same character, not the same setting, and not the same narrative circumstances, what’s actually left of the original IP that the fanfiction is intended to be based on.
At what point do we start to consider that this indeed, might just be original fiction under the guise of a transformative work? When I see this, I see a creative spark for the creation of original works, characters, and narratives, but the inability to break free from the comfort and familiarity that the original IP offers. Sometimes it’s a creative block on the side of the writer. They’re coming into this specific writing process with the inclination that that they’re creating fanfiction and don’t see the potential for originality in their own work. Sometimes it’s the practicality of understanding what the amateur writing community looks like. Readers like fanfiction. They also like the familiarity. Yet they struggle to trust original work from an independent writer.
Is it possible or necessary to bridge the gap between these two ideas? Are there ways to utilize the pre-existing communities around fanfiction to support independent original fiction? Because we’re already converting sufficiently popular fanfiction into traditionally published fiction after stripping away all semblance of the original IP. This is something people with absolutely tolerate. So what does that say about the creative process when we can so easily blur the lines between original and transformative by making such simple and calculated changes?