Sounds like you despise the very core of the game, haha.
I think you're knee-jerking a bit there.
Someone describing real issues with something doesn't mean they "despise" it. That's this weird thing people jump to on the internet these days. It's got worse and worse over the years. The mildest criticism now is you hate something, and if you praise something even slightly, you're a "FANBOY!!!" and love the product beyond all reason. It's always particularly funny when in the same thread, you get called both.
The point is D&D has been built on this yikes-y concept, historically. I don't hate the concept, it can absolutely be fun to act like a bunch of vikings or whatever, but I do think it's got a fuse on it and however long that fuse is, it's eventually going to reach the bomb. And I will be honest, I'd much rather fight Drow or the like (intellectually and physically equal to the PCs) than some race/species that's all-round inferior. I do not D&D has been moving away from the concept of inferiority, even in monster races, for a long time though. It backslid a ton going from 4E to 5E (even from 3E to 5E there was some backsliding), particularly with Volos, but is moving rapidly away from that now.
Not making fun! Genuinely intrigued what your D&D games are like now and how you envision the perfect "final form" of the game in the future.
I mean, we're usually fighting people who are effectively making the PCs the underdogs, rather than having the PCs kicking and looting their way through of bunch of goblins/kobolds or the like. In my main campaign an East India Company-style megacorporation is the long-term adversary, which is something I think fits surprisingly well with D&D plus everybody hates the East India Company, they're the Arasaka of the 1700s.
I think what a lot of designers do is just make supernatural beings/forces be behind everything, which also works but I find gets pretty old pretty fast.
This fictional version of the past really needs to stop being repeated. The table top community has always been one step ahead in terms of acceptance and inclusion my entire life. Anyone telling you different is just trying to sell you something.
It's not "fictional" and no-one is "telling" me it. I started playing in 1989. I met a lot of gamers who were older than me, and about the same age, and whilst the majority were definitely cool people, there was a sadly significant minority who were just creeps of various kinds, and particularly misogynists. As time has worn on, it's been increasingly unacceptable to act like that, so those people have been pushed out of the hobby to a significant degree. But they existed well into the '90s.
I guess the point is that both were true at the same time. There were plenty of groups people who were more accepting and open-minded than the norm (not all of those people were "losers" or "outsiders" though), but there were also groups of people who were the unpleasant kinds of loser, and trying to paint a rosy picture of the past is misleading.
Well, there was this small company called WhiteWolf...
Uh-huh, which appealed to a wide section of the market, including plenty of kids who weren't in any meaningful way "losers" or "outsiders". The LARP might have been Goths-only, but the tabletop sure wasn't. This was never more obvious than playing it at university in the late '90s.