Gnomes and Halflings did not have a strength penalty. Oh, you might be part of the camp that claims that they should have had a penalty this whole time, but the hard truth is, they were designed without that penalty. They did not have it. So, Kobolds had no reason to have it.
Well, to be fair, Kobolds are
even smaller than Gnomes and Halflings. As an aside, I remember an article early in 4e where a designer (I forget who) saying that they made halflings
taller than they were in previous editions because they (had a three-year old child, I think?) couldn't imagine anyone that small being very effective in a fight. (Or something to that effect). I remember at the time thinking, "Who cares? It's fantasy!"
And for orcs, they have been depicted in such a wide range of ways... The slice of fantasy where "orc = dum" is true is not nearly as large as it once was, and mechanically enforcing that did not make a whit of difference.
I'm not sure that a -2 to Int makes someone dumb. Similar to your point below, you can still get a 16 (maybe not with point-buy or an array). It's just suggesting that, on average, most are a
little slower than other types.
And, if we want to talk about the racial modifiers being swappable.... again, this is beyond a minor point. Using point buy, an Elf with a +2 dex could get a 16, and a human with a +1 could.... get a 16. Take Variant human, take a feat with a +1 Dex attached, and you have the same +2 Dex as that elf. So, are elves truly defined by the dexterous nature? When the most commonly used human can be built to match an elf in dex? Or a Dwarf in Con? Or an Aasimar in Charisma? These "big differences" like between a chimpmunk and a tortoise simply do not exist.
When 5e was first released, I didn't like that Humans got +1 in everything. To me, human average was always modeled by 10's in all stats (well, 10.5 really) so this was "saying" that all humans are now slightly
above average and other races are worse, except where they're better. Weird.
... At this point I just don't think ability scores mean a whole lot. They're a mechanical gamist thing that tells you a
little bit about your character relative to others, but not much. A halfling with an 18 strength is NOT as strong as a goliath with an 18 strength, regardless of the matching scores. The same thing goes for the other abilities. It's not like in the world of the game, there's any way to really judge these things, after all.
(Just like the real world. It's not too hard to judge real people's strength, I suppose, but wisdom? Charisma? We can -sort of- tell if someone is good or bad at these things, but certainly not on a scale of 1 to 20. Even IQ has been proven to be a terribly inaccurate way to measure intelligence.)
In the end, I think that Ability Scores are just a game mechanic that say only a little about your character. High strength means you're strong. How strong? Who knows? Low Intelligence means you're not very bright. How dumb? Who knows? I mean, low charisma can mean anything from ugly to rude to weak-willed. (Not all of those things happen at once.)
That reminds me - As charisma morphed away from being more about your looks (as it was early on) to more about your personality (as it became, even though it was always both), one hold-out that always bothered me was when orcs had a negative to charisma (because they were uncouth and ugly?) but the side-effect was that they weren't very intimidating! I mean, should there be anything MORE intimidating than an orc barbarian? But nooooo... they were wishy-washy because charisma represented too many things.
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