Certainly this is completely setting dependent. Presumably in FR halflings have some halfling deity (Yolonda, something like that, I don't care about FR) that made them, just like the every other race. And seriously, it super doesn't matter. What the people believe about their origins might matter a bit, but that is just one tiny bit of culture and religion.
No. I covered the FR lore. Yondalla found them and then suddenly halflings went from nomad scavengers to... well I guess nomad/farmer/human-espy/happy people.
That is the reason I keep bringing it up, because while pretty much every other FR race was made by someone at some point... halflings just appear.
And again, it does matter. You say it is one tiny bit of culture and religion but it is one of the foundational questions of existence. It matters a lot.
You may feel that way. Is it also a problem to you that goblins and hobgoblins are similar to each other? Halflings in many settings are 'related' to humans, they're in Middle-Earth for example. This is really not a problem, it explains why these two species tend to get along so well.
Hobgoblins and goblins aren't similar. I actually made them more similiar in my homebrew, and am working to make goblins, hobgoblins and ogres a single species at three different stages of development. But baseline, official DnD lore? They are incredibly different races.
There are crazy number of races and subraces in D&D, every trope is done several times there are a huge amount of overlap. Drow, tieflings, shadar-kai and probably some others I forget can all do the 'mistrusted outcast of magical race' thing. There are a ton of 'big brute' races, there are five different sort of reptile people, two differnt types of cat people plus semi-cat shifters, there are like three different sorts of playable merpeople, not counting monster races such as kuo-toa and sahuagin. Any concept you can come up will have some overlap with concept of some other race. That's why I'd never put all of them in one setting. Now if you like goblins more in the niche I described, cool, go for it. I don't, goblins in this setting would be mischievous magical beings dwelling in dark places.
The issue I have with basically all the halfling complaints in this thread is that the same applies to any non-human race in the game but people just laser-focus on halflings because they personally don't care for them.
Nope. I think you are wrong.
Drow -> A race of elves who betrayed their creator god and turned their back on them. They worship spiders, are ruled by a matriarchy and are a race of slavers and sadists.
Tieflings -> a sub-set of races, normally human, who made a deal with infernal powers. The details of the deal are unclear, but the power has manifested in their bloodline shaping their children and grandchildren, even if they have not made any compact with the Hells. They are generally outcasts and mistrusted by society, and either accept that or act to prove people wrong.
Shadar-Kai -> A race of people, sometimes elves, sometimes Humans, who were trapped in the Shadowfell. In 5e they are elves who fell into the shadow fell alongside the Raven Queen, serving her eternally as they are continously reborn when they die. The previous human form of them, if memory serves, was a race of people who sought pain and ecstasy because the shadowfell sucked away their will to live, and eventually they would fade to dust and die if they did not keep themselves desiring life.
These are three quite different concepts. They really aren't interchangeable. Maybe the shadar-kai and the drow, but the shadar-kai are undergoing a shift and aren't nearly as solid as the drow which have been a continous story for decades.
Mistrusted outcast of a magical race? Sure, that's one way to play a drow. I wouldn't say it fit the new Shadar-Kai at all, what is the point in making an outcast out of someone who when they die is just going to come back anyways in a new body? And you don't have to play Drow as an outcast at all. There are other paths for them.
Big Brute races? Yeah, there are a lot of races who "I'm the big guy" is a major element to them, but Orcs, Minotaurs, Goliaths, Loxodons and Centaurs are VASTLY different. Maybe you can put Minotaur and the Orcs together, but I've seen too many different interpretations to think that that is standard.
So, no, I'm not "laser-focused" on halflings because I don't like them. And I do personally feel like it makes more sense to fold Tabaxi and Minotaurs into shifters and make "Beast-Folk" as a more general race. It is much cleaner in my opinion. But, this thread isn't about shifters. This thread is about halflings, so I try to stay on subject and not start talking about my fixes for other races.