That's D&D though isn't? The Ranger was designed so you could play Aragorn.
Honestly it feels to me like the throughline to Gygax to 5e is that the game was designed to offer a grab bag of character options without much care to how they all fit together outside of the dungeon or adventure at hand.
Gimli, the guy from the Kung Fu TV series, Van Helsing and a character from a Poul Anderson novel team up and explore a fantastic underworld.
True. The pont is those ideas grew and morphed to be parts of D&D and make sense.
The Ranger was Aragorn. The Ranger now is the all the Rangers of the North, protectors of civilization from the monsters and savages. The class morphed to fit D&DD's mentality.
The Halfling, I feel, remains static. Or more accurately, it reverted back to the time when it was grabbed option character option.
For example. I am developing a setting called Klassico. The idea is to take all the ideas of D&D and fit them together into a consistent and coherent concept.
So in it, Halflings feed the Dwarves. They solve the "how do Dwarves survive in a mountain problem.". Well the Halflings camp out in villages all around Dwarven mountain and grow grain. And they trade the grain for metal and protection. The halflings have an army but it's barebones and designed to hold out for a halfling to alert the dwarves who will pour out the mountain pissed as someone is disrupting crucial production of the grain need for their alcohol (and food I guess). The Dwarven chief god and the Halfling chief goddess have an arraigned marriage between their second children. And this allows Stout halflings to be born.
The halflings do something similiar with some humans and this is how you get lightfoots. The elves scoffed at the idea. Some orcs are tempted to try it out.
Now halfling shires full of do nothings make sense. They are breadbaskets for hungry big folk. They are passive folk because they are protected for their food production in a harsh world. Halflings can produce a lot of food and don't need to eat much. Halfling fighters are those who hang out with the patrols too often and get all red-knighty. Halfling rogues come from all the commerce running through the shires and the low number of dwarven spies. And halfling magic items are ralated to food production of gifted smaller versions of their bigger protector's weapons and armor. Now halflings feel like they fit.