Chaosmancer
Legend
I mean, there's also that one table in the DMG about modifying NPC's to be certain races, and all of those have pluses to their stats (in addition to the normal racial features) so I don't think, in this case, the PC's being special is why they get those pluses.
Sure, but that is an optional DMG rule, compared to the stats which are front and center in the PHB. For player use.
It really comes back to, how often do you actually bother to stat out an NPC? Do you bother to do the math to know how strong the butcher has to be to be able to lift that pig carcass he is putting into the cart? Or do you just assume that he is capable of doing it? Or how strong the hunter has to be to bring the stag they shot back to the settlement, along with how dexterous because they needed to kill it with a single shot with a longbow, and that isn't actually easy to do?
So, with the idea that we generally don't bother with NPCs stats, we can look towards only PCs. And when we do we can quite quickly realize that there is little to no reason to prevent people from building characters which are equally effective, despite being different (race/species/kith/ect)