I'm not opposed to floating stats but they've been ham fisted into 5E. It's more if a 6E thing.
Basically the races need to be rewritten to incorporate them.
I mean, yeah, but 5E has been on it's back feet ever since it was unexpectedly massively successful. It's ducking and diving, dodging and weaving, and trying to float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, and not get KO'd by something dumb.
So yeah, that was a bit of a clumsy way to get them in, but unless 6E was going to happen, like, this year, they probably needed to at least start making some apparent progress now.
I mean, what they want to avoid is another PF-type situation. Now, this kind of thing wouldn't be likely to cause an issue as large-scale as PF, but a lot of RPGers, and influential ones, care about this kind of thing (including big streamers/podcasters/etc.). If D&D hadn't reacted, hadn't started making progress, it might have easily have been that a narrative built up that WotC didn't really care (and maybe they don't, who knows, but they're giving the impression they do which is what matters for now). That narrative would have encouraged big, influential people to at least try other RPGs, and see if they got a good audience with them, and it would have encouraged other players to do likewise. We probably wouldn't have got a schism, but we might well have seem something less like 4E/PF and more like 2E/Loads of games, where D&D suddenly started losing ground to a bunch of much smaller RPGs, and if one of them got popular, it might well gain momentum. D&D was never going to get "canceled" - its modern sins aren't big enough - but it might have got slightly disfavoured, and even a slight disfavouring might kill momentum and significantly lower profits.
So just coming at this from a purely pragmatic view, I think they're playing it pretty well, despite some unforced errors. Even the more activist-end of things stuff, where it's not entirely opposed to D&D (so already a lost cause), seems be like "Hmph well they're trying - they could try much harder, but I guess they're trying".