IMHO, the folk process would indeed be dead if it was only an academic exercise – but it isn't.
Yes, there are individuals/clubs even who will claim a song or tune must be played exactly as per the original version but perhaps their process is the one that is dead. If we write a song and then sing it to others either directly or by recording it, we set it free for those others to place their own interpretation on it. This can mean changing place names to "localise" the song (how many versions of Aragon Mill are there?), altering the rhythm, words, order of verses, even the whole tune because we prefer our own "version", because we can't play the chords to the original or because we misheard it.
A listening audience does not sit analytically, each having heard the original, and then decry the altered version.
Hamish Henderson was doing some Gaelic recordings back in the fifties on one of the Hebridean Islands when an elderly woman sang him an altered version of "The Banks of Sicily" which she insisted she had learnt from her mother. Hamish of course had written the song about ten years earlier. Was he annoyed? Of course not, he was thrilled to bits!

If the folk process is dead then so are we!

Eddie