As far as easily recognisable in play I would probably put Dwarves at the top followed by goblins, and then perhaps, gnomes, halforcs and halflings.
Tieflings, Genasi, elves and Half-elves (anything "human but cooler") tend to in play just be humans with cool powers.
In my expeirence Half-Orcs are played exactly like a player would play an orc that wasn't a genocidal monster. Personally, I feel like people would be just as happy having orcs that they could play as instead of "half-orcs" which are the orcs you can play as.
to your "humans but with cool powers"...Tieflings, Genasi and Half-elves are generally "half-human but a cool parent that gives them powers". So... yeah, that's how they should get played. Most of them are just altered humans, so playing them like an altered human makes sense. And if you wanted to play a tiefling, genasi or Aasimaar that isn't an altered human... you'd probably either lean far harder into their planar connection (This is what a mortal fire elemental would be like) or make them an altered something else.
I can give you that elves are tricky. But that is actually partially because the ways they aren't human are so inhuman that it makes it hard to roleplay. A character who never sleeps is hard to conceptualize, because sleep is a fundamental part of our experience. The closest to "elf" would seem to be "robot" but we know that doesn't quite fit.
And this really the basic structural purpose of races, a kind of broad rough strokes hook for play and differentiation.
Worldbuilding is really not the purpose of them. Worldbuilding with nuanced distinct societies is much easier without them.
Edit: A lot of people seem to be saying they don't know what to do with halflings. This seems to be from a GM's perspective. I've never seen players have that problem. (Of course if you do you just choose something else, but plenty of players over the years have known what to do with them). The PC races are not, and have never been there for GMs. Even Gygax supposedly didn't really want them, but he put them in for his players.
So if your problem as a GM is how to make a coherent world with the options before you, then you just have to do what GMs have been doing since the 70s. Solve your problems yourself. The game doesn't care. It puzzles me that people see these inconsistencies as problems rather than opportunites - I always though that the fun of worldbuilding in D&D was rationalising these things and coming up with your own takes and solutions.
And I just fundamentally disagree with this idea. Maybe 2e had the wrong idea in how they handled publishing material, but there are multiple people who make their entire livelihoods right now around consolidating and making Youtube videos around DnD Lore. The fact that DnD offers up complete worlds and their own internal lore is an important part of the game.
Yes, we can make our own. Yes, I often do make my own because I'm a writer and I like world-building. But this idea that WoTC should never be held to any standards because if they make something bad the community can just fix it is a terrible model. Because it heads in one of two directions.
1) A game with no lore, you get raw statistics and the rest is made up by the community. This means that anyone who can't make up their own lore is unable to run the game, unless they wish to run it like a miniatures wargame where you just move your piece on the board.
2) A game with terrible lore, that actively makes the game harder to play or even makes it unplayable. this at least gives people a choice, you can make your own, not play, or play with bad stories and bad lore.
I love homebrewing my own worlds. I do. But that doesn't mean that I'm not going to hold the company responsible to actually providing decent lore. Yes, the community has come up with a lot of things I think would improve halflings... why is it wrong to take that next step and say "WoTC, you should look into doing some of these things."
Because, guess what? If you don't like the direction they take halflings? If you think halfling beekeepers are stupid and dum and you hate them? You can make up your own lore. You can change it back. But at least WoTC will have done something other than CTRL+C halflings yet again into the game without trying to make them actually unique to DnD.
