I find the drow an interesting case.
I would want them to be different than most who dwell under the sun. Very pale makes more sense but obsidian black is simply alien.
no one on earth is the inky black of a moonless night...and def not with orange eyes.
we DO have folks that deal with albinism. Real people.
we likewise don’t have green people or genuinely gray people.
i think people are missing the first for the trees. And good elves aren’t all white by a long shot. Many are quite brown or copper.
if the artists actually drew the descriptions, this would not even be a debate.
To bounce off of this: if there's a problem in representation, it's going to first manifest as
anti-inclusion. (in hobbies, inclusion comes before diversity.) In other words, the main way it happens is people of a certain group taking a look in the book and deciding they will not be welcome in the hobby.
The first impression isn't going to come from a deep dive into the lore. Nor will it come from a paragraph on how variable alignment is within a species... it'll come from people flipping through the book, looking primarily at the pictures, and either thinking "this looks like fun" or thinking "this isn't for me." Some of the later category will be people who aren't into fantasy in the first place.
But for some people, it'll be them seeing a bunch of unwelcoming stereotypes played out in the art and wondering if the people okay with this stuff will be honestly okay with them, as people. If ever dark-skinned character in the books looks like a villain, that might be a red flag to dark-skinned people who are taking a look at the game. If all the women are depicted in a sexualized manner, women might feel like they'd be subjecting themselves to being objectified by showing up. Etc.
But, of course, it's not as simple as that, even: having inky-black skin isn't necessarily enough by itself, especially if the rest of the picture looks Caucasian (like many drow, but not all). And if the pattern doesn't exist, the individual picture might not matter: if there's obviously heroes and villains of all skin tones, then a dark-skinned villain might not read as a racial thing at all. And the order and prominence of any given piece of art can make it weigh differently (ie the villain on the front cover being coded as POC is a big problem, while one in the MM might not be.)
The only way to get objective about it would be to do surveys, but those surveys need to account for the groups you're worried about excluding. If you want to know if Asians feel like the game has anti-Asian racism in it, you need to ask a bunch of Asians and collect the data. (Or, at the very least, check with trained experts like sociologists and anthropologists, but they'd probably just tell you how to design the study, and maybe point out some glaring stuff if there's any such issues.)
And with respect to actual 1e DnD - I'm not sure even that's worth doing, since it's not being made anymore. Anyone buying those books now wants them for nostalgia or historical context, so the most we could do is put a disclaimer in the front and preserve them as they were for posterity. If we're talking about Dungeons & Dragons as an IP going forward, or OSR in general, the best we can do is let the creators know we'd like them to think about these issues and try to be as inclusive as possible.