Removing explicit half-races is a problem, because some settings make them a distinct culture, e.g. Eberron's Khoravar. It also messes up some of the dragon marked races.
It's also throwing out something that's been part of the game since 1978. May as well throw out the rogue at that point.
As I was just saying to a friend, Eberron was amazing in 3e because the world was custom tailored to the details and quirks of the system, down to the smallest details. But then the problem became that editions changed and Eberron was forced to choose between major retcon updates or carving out exceptions to protect its core nature. They went with the latter, and I can't say that was the wrong choice, but it means with every new edition Eberron becomes more of a city in a bottle. Preserved in time against the changed of the ages.
What I'm saying is, Eberron has handled this before and will handle it again.
As for throwing out parts of the game... friend, I don't know how to break this to you, but Rogues were only invented in the year 2000. Before that we had Thieves, and they died so the Rogue could live. As did the Assassin class. We also used to have race-as-class for the non-human races, an entirely different type of multi-classing, alignment limitations on classes, rolls for Wizards to be able to learn a new spell, percentile Strength, and the list goes on.
Lots of long standing game features have been deemed flawed or obsolete and let fall aside in an edition change over. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they live on in spirit, and sometimes people discover they don't miss them all that much. If half-races live on as a cosmetic choice instead of a mechanical differentiator that inspires endless debates about why some crosses get stats and others don't, well, I'll be ecstatic.
