Lanefan
Victoria Rules
There's a chicken-and-egg problem here.It depends, for sure. An Athas campaign will have different options than a Middle-Earth campaign.
But what about a homebrew? What about a world where a GM has determined a list of available races ahead of time and then sends them to the players; won’t that list very likely seem random to the players? Won’t whatever context is shared just seem like justification for the GM’s choices?
If I start a campaign and I tell players to make characters, and then I take the races they’ve opted for their PCs and any related background details, and then I use that to build a world, what makes this more random?
If I'm DMing, not only am I curating the list of available species but I'm also a) tweaking the rules (e.g. ASI bonus/penalty, species abilities, etc.) for each one and b) designing the setting to suit those species and their histories etc. The players need to see those tweaked rules in order to have enough info to roll up their characters, meaning that by the time the players get access to it the list of available species is already locked and loaded and the setting has been designed.
The other option is to have the players in effect roll up their characters blind as regards just what their non-Human PCs will have going for them. Somehow doing it that way doesn't seem so appealing.