Avoiding rebuilding the table is definitely possible for certain schema changes like adding a new field.

But supporting data type changes without rebuilding is not ideal. It will lead to data quality issues and complexity on the application. Integer -> String example is simple. But what about String -> integer, how are the consumers of data supposed to handle the situation where the field in some records has a string value and in some has an integer value? They will have to add type checking which complicates each of these consumers.

Then some of the downstream consumers such as data warehouses depend on strict data validations. We went through this problem at Uber- I blogged about it here https://www.uber.com/blog/dbevents-ingestion-framework/