You're correct about how developers getting promoted or moving to other studios can affect things, but it goes further than that. Honestly, it is because whole teams and individual team members change over time. People age and grow, life priorities shift and move. Becoming a parent, for example, radically shifts a person's priorities. Any of the game's major decision-makers becoming a parent can drastically alter the direction of the game. The longer a game or franchise runs, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the singularity of vision.

If we hire somebody completely new to take over, we lose that singularity of vision because the new leader will bring a new perspective. Even if we hire longtime fans of the game to work on it, the ascended fans' decisions will emphasize what they liked about the game and de-emphasize what they didn't. This can take a game in a direction that portions of the playerbase dislike - the players who don't share the same likes as the ascended fan. Think of what would happen to the Dark Souls franchise if the new leader was only a fan of the difficult boss fight aspect and chose not to spend those resources on the ambience and world building aspect of the game.

To some extent, yes - developers and influential stakeholders will move around as part of their careers or lives. Developers will grow and change over time, they'll take new jobs, retire, have kids, and their lives and priorities will change. New decisionmakers will join the team and will have different visions for the franchise than their predecessors. Beyond this, even player tastes will grow, change, and evolve over time as well. The old stuff that was super popular before won't cut it again if there isn't anything new to offer. If the directional changes meet the collective players' (both new and returning) tastes, the franchise will continue to see success. If they don't satisfy, the franchise will struggle.

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I've actually worked on and shipped more than one annual sports title over my career and I want say for the record that the idea that annual sports titles are "mostly minor tweaks and roster changes" is absolutely and categorically false. Annual sports titles absolutely do not have the same scope as AAA games with multi-year dev cycles, but they do absolutely have significant breadth and depth of scope each year beyond "minor tweaks and roster changes".

The majority changes that occur each year are spread out because they must be - there simply isn't enough development time within the ~11ish calendar months between launches to rebuild everything, so decisions must be made about what gets added/updated this year and what waits for next year. That means that, besides roster updates and minor tweaks, this year we're committing to change our animation system, these eight specific stadiums/arenas, these three game modes, update the commentary system, and rework the stat simulation. Next year, we're committing to these other eight stadiums/arenas, these other four game modes, the physics system, the VFX system, and the AI logic. This sort of round-robin approach is necessary - the dev team often isn't large enough to sustain working on everything each cycle so we need to pick and choose what we can do each year within the time we have. It also means that players who only engage with some of the game likely don't necessarily see (or notice) all of the changes we make each time around. This doesn't mean that we didn't do it or that the changes aren't there, but it can certainly look like not much has changed if the player isn't playing those parts of the game.

To your main question - The primary reason that annual sports games haven't transitioned to a live service model is because of inertia. There is a well-established and financially sustainable annual sales model that works. There would need to be a significant and tangible gain to be had by switching to a live service model other than novelty - all of the current existing tools and systems are built with the expectation of delivering a new retail game each year, and all of the dev experience built up is for delivering a new retail game each year. Switching over to an ongoing service would come at tremendous cost. There must be a gain to outweigh that cost in order for the publishers to do it.

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