Not here. But it definitely was a major argument in ASI threads around the release of Tasha's.
Where then? I didn't see any real difference between the arguments here and on /r/dndnext and Twitter, except more people supported change in those latter two.
Pick what? I am talking about 5e, mostly. I'm not some grognard that is in love with old editions of D&D, they were mostly incoherent rubbish.
Pick whether you're going to engage in whataboutery or dismiss it. You can't rationally do both.
They absolutely are smarter in the sense D&D intelligence measures. i.e. memory and reasoning. They may not do so well in lateral thinking and creativity, but that's not what we're talking about.
I don't know if I really agree that they are, because trying to say "lateral thinking isn't reasoning" is incredibly tortured thinking, frankly. Smarter people are better at lateral thinking, period. It's not even an argument. I guess it's beside the point though, because they're not a D&D race, and nobody is assessing them as such.
Complaints about 'biological essentialism' were a a huge thing in the threads around Tashas'. I am definitely not making this up. But I am also not particularly interested in relitigating that, and if you don't think that it is a sensible angle, then great!
I think it's a relevant angle with some races where D&D was ending up in a gross place, but I think it's only a key issue when negative stuff is asserted (like mental stat penalties and/or universal negative personality traits), but yeah I don't think it's a broad issue. I think people talked about it because the worst stuff 5E was doing with races involved it.
The rules tell you what it measures.
But the actual usage of the stat is absolutely not consistent with the brief blurbs 5E offers, nor with the more complex explanations previous editions offered. And pretending previous editions don't matter is incompatible with stuff like claiming 1E was attempting verisimilitude. And indeed your entire issue is reliant on it having been done differently in the past.
So you think splats like races and classes only exist for balance reason? I don't buy that. They're thematic archetypes with rules that support those themes. And that's how it should be.
"Only"? No, I didn't say that, did I?
But balance is why you can change races like this but not classes. It's not very complicated.
My 5e PHB relatively clearly tells what the ability scores measure. Seems coherent enough.
I disagree I guess, and it's particularly not a great match to previous editions.
What you omit here is that by this logic a halfling (equated to a weak human) should definitely never be as strong as a strong human. So ability modifiers should exist.
It doesn't actually follow in a fantasy setting that a Halfling should be weaker than a human. They already have "chimp strength". They should have less leverage and reach. But leverage and reach are not well-represented by ASIs - they're better represented by specific size-related rules.