This change stinks of virtue signalling. It's a meaningless change that does nothing to improve society.
I don't think you know what "virtue signalling" means. I mean, it's funny because you point out that species isn't much better, but you still claim this. Species is indeed not much better, but you seem to think WotC are too dumb to know that?
As for "improve society", what the hell? That's obviously not something a one-word change in D&D is going to do. Why would you even bring that up? That's like objecting to fluoridation of the water because it doesn't cure cancer. Nonsensical.
They've moving away from race not to "virtue signal", but because it's not a good descriptor (species ain't great but it is better), and because it gives them clear space away from real-world discussions of race. You don't have to like it, but from a business point of view it's clearly smart. You're trying to see it through a very peculiar lens though and seem to have missed that.
I've never encountered anyone who wouldn't play DnD due to it's racist undertones.
There are plenty of people who dislike D&D for that, especially younger ones. WotC is aware of this and is trying to avoid it becoming a major issue, though. It's called getting ahead of the problem.
What's actually astonishing is how long and well D&D has lasted despite being, essentially, about brutally murdering a bunch of often intellectually and physically inferior beings and taking their stuff (yikes lol). Honestly only sheer intertia and the fact that so very many games are about that are we still getting away with this, frankly. One day that may well not be true, but I think videogames will keep it going for long enough that TTRPGs will gradually transition away from killing goblins and the like.
DnD used to be game that brought together the losers, misfits, and the socially awkward (myself being defined by one if not all of those terms).
Except that's not really true. Especially as those people often includes kids who were losers/misfits precisely because they were racists or misogynists even beyond what was acceptable in society back then. And girls and minority kids were often rejected or mistreated by the same "losers" you're claiming the game "brought together".
Further, even by the extremely early 1990s, RPGs weren't appealing to the same "I see myself as an outcast" crowd as a lot of '80s D&D players were. I don't think anyone in my D&D groups in the 1990s was a loser or misfit in terms of school/society. These were straight-A kids and jocks and so on. Hell the biggest toughest most violent (only towards objects/walls, mostly, thankfully) jock in my school was in my group for a while.
I'm not even sure it was entirely true in the '80s but I leave it to people who were around then to comment on that.
When my grand-kids start teasing other kids and call them intellectually disabled, that term will become a thing of the past.
That will
literally never happen because it's not a punchy insult, it's a clunky multisyllabic term that a lot of eight-year-olds would struggle to pronounce, let alone use as an offensive weapon! Whereas the other words you list are pretty ideal. And only one of them is actually socially unacceptable.
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