Which raises the question of how you distinguish hobgoblins and orcs behaviourally without being a racial essentialist. Because even being 'like Romans' by default is the sort of thing some want to remove from the game.
I dunno, I think we can still specify typical cultures, we just can't say "they're all evil!". I mean, I'm pretty sure not all Romans were "evil" by D&D standards (though an awful lot were), and "like Romans" is nuanced enough in people's minds that they don't think "so automatically evil" (ironically it would be people like me who were more likely to think that lol!).
Like this is the issue with Orcs, what is culture? Unidentified Generic Violent Barbarians. If they instead were "Like Vikings", in the way that Hobgoblins are "Like Romans", by default, then we'd have a much more nuanced idea of them. Yeah, we'd assume some were violent raiders, but not all of them. I think it should be a little more complex note, I actually think the "like Romans" thing is a bit lazy but it's been pretty consistent.
Just if you're going to identify someone's culture, give them, y'know, a culture with at least a tiny bit of depth, or use language and ideas which will cause people to imagine it with some depth. Doesn't mean they don't need to be one that's potentially going to be in conflict with PCs.
I honestly think we could stand to use more conflict with what used to be called "demihuman" races, but I've literally always thought that - again in part I think because my introduction to D&D involved settings with a lot of that - the FR has much of the conflict being with "evil humans", for example, and Taladas has a ton of "monster" races as playable (with Minotaur Rome, even, as a multi-cultural sort of place, and without the slavery as a major deal - in fact it might be deleted entirely), and much of the conflict likely to be with humans and elves with bad intentions.
You're arguing that imagining a ravenous hyena-demon whose feast of death spawns psychotic, human-eating, sentient hyena-folk in its wake is morally wrong.
I don't see a single post from anyone in this thread that says anything of the sort.
Maybe don't make things up about what other people said? It's so much easier if you quote them when saying this sort of thing - that way you yourself may see you are wrong whilst typing it.