It is legitimately interesting, though, that dragonborn--who are by far the most non-human-looking of the PHB races, and frankly less human-looking than the vast majority of 5e options--have risen so far. All the way to 3rd place if you split apart elves by their individual subraces (or 4th if you lump elves together), surpassing even tiefling. Obviously "dragons are cool" has some appeal, but it's really weird to have such non-human-looking options be ranked so highly. MMOs almost exclusively favor the particularly humanoid (and, among humanoid, the particularly beautiful, as you say) options.
As an avid dragonborn fan, I'm obviously super happy about this, but that doesn't make it any less weird.
I think Dragonborn hit multiple archetypes not otherwise present in the PHB, which is probably why they're so popular:
1) Big strong guy.
They're by far the tallest and bulkiest race in the PHB and have a STR bonus. A lot of people who would never play Mountain Dwarf will play them.
2) Honorable warrior race guy.
They're the closest you're going to get to Klingons, Neitzscheans, Luxans, and so on in the PHB (and one of the closest in D&D generally), and people just love that vibe.
3) Animal-person or Dragon-person.
A strangely underserved niche in D&D, though there are quite a lot of bird-persons, and I guess there's the Tabaxi (the lack of dog/wolf people in a 5E book remains bizarre, I guess loads of 3PPs have done it to death though). Anyway if you don't want to be a human-looking-type they're your only PHB option.
On top of that, yeah, they're badass dragons who breath fire and stuff.
I don't actually agree re: weird, in MMORPGs it doesn't work quite like you say. Humans and Elves are usually the most popular races. But right after them, usually next is not "whatever else is pretty", it's often a big animal-man or the like. WoW shows this (figures from 2019 but no new races have been added since):
The statistic shows the share of the various races in the online computer game World of Warcraft as of December 2019.
www.statista.com
Humans and Elves way at the top, but immediately after them on Alliance we have Draenei (big, strong demon-people) and Worgen (Werewolf-people). On Horde, Elves again are at the top, but then it's Orcs (the handsomer, now-standing-up-straight Orcs of WoW) and Tauren (Minotaur-people) - both slightly higher than they look because of Highmountain Tauren and Mag'har Orcs lower down the list (which are essentially slight appearance-changes of the same races).
FFXIV used to follow this pattern but over the years cat-people and dragon-people became the most popular races with humans a distant third. But in that game both the cat and dragon people are extremely human-looking, with human faces for example. Whereas FFXIV elves are kind of terrible-looking. Evidently if you're not a sexy elf you don't count for elf-ing purposes.
