Agreed.
I was cogitating some of the statements made in this thread and something occurred to me in regards to the notion of "edginess" and "pablum" in the art and writing.
5e is by far the edgiest and least pablum, most in your face edition of D&D ever produced. You think that the whole "Satanic Panic" was bad? You think that line art of boobies is edgy? My 5e books would have been banned and burned not that long ago. Don't think so? Well, let's look at some specifics shall we?
1. My Dragon Heist book has NPC's who are openly gay and are living openly in a married household. Not that long ago, this would have been suicidal to publish. The backlash would have sunk any chances of printing the game. Heck, even as it was, including a single line about including non-binary and gay characters into the game in the PHB was grounds for major flare ups on forums, Reddit and other places with people being banned from this site for their views, and all sorts of extreme vitriol.
Don't believe me? Scroll back a few years in the forums, or search for the threads.
2. The very first page of my 5e PHB has a black man in a turban wearing some sort of desert gear fighting goblns. You think you could have done that in 2001 with the release of 3.5, just shortly after 9/11? Good luck with that. AD&D didn't even include any images of non-whites in the core books. If you weren't white, you didn't exist. A book with a black man on the first page in 1976? Not a freaking chance.
So, yeah, I'll see your line art boobies and call. The art and writing in 5e includes elements that you couldn't even begin to hint at 10, 20, 30 years ago. Pablum? I kinda wonder what the meaning of that actually is considering that the 5e books have all the flavor of earlier books PLUS a bunch more. Edgy? Having the stones to stand up and be counted on the side of social justice is about as edgy as it gets boys and girls. It's the stuff that gets your stores firebombed and your writers death threats. Pablum would be going back to the old books where everyone is CIS, white, and minorities don't exist.
Temple of elemental evil CRPG came out in the around 200x (still using e3.0 rules) had the possibility of a gay romance.
Imho D&D was more open minded than the "Zeitgeist" during most periods. Simply because D&D has mostly users of better than average intellect and education which includes more tolerance and liberality.