One point to take into consideration here is that this is a new game being designed by a different group of designers and therefore has the opportunity to change the flaws you have outlined.
I noted that:
Point buy for races is pretty much inevitably dreadful, looking at the many games which have attempted it.
This is not something that someone tried once and screwed up. This is something countless people, in countless gains, have tried, and not done well with.
Now, if you can explain specifically how they'd deal with the problems it causes, sure, that'd be interesting. And yeah there's always a chance they'll just hit upon some cool system, but I am pretty skeptical.
Racial abilities should not be considered in combination with classes. Their racial abilities. That racial darkvision you mention? It has a point. Your character had it and used it from birth up until the point where he acquired redundant darkvision from the subclass. A redundant ability isn't a big deal, and if it is, don't choose the subclass that is at fault. I also disagree that the wood elf ability to hide in light obscurement(not in plain sight) is useless for non-rogues. Often over the decades I have had a PC who would have killed to have that ability. Bounded accuracy makes it useful for any class. It's okay for racial abilities to not match your class and/or subclass.
This isn't an actual argument you're presenting, rather an unsupported opinion (indeed, some of it is outright illogical - the "had since birth" thing in the context of a points-based balance discussion is
beyond irrelevant). I presented an actual argument - flat values are bad, because the actual utility of abilities varies wildly to different characters.
I'm not saying they need to be tied to classes, because that would be impractical, but my point is, once you start putting flat values on racial abilities, and letting people buy and sell them from their "version" of a race, you inevitably favour certain subclasses and certain races in a pretty unreasonable way that isn't currently a problem. This isn't an argument
in favour of non-fixed values. This is an argument
against points-based races.
The only argument I can see in favour is that if they were done well, you might make it so that some wildly underpowered races (Genasi, for example) got a lot more discretionary points to spend than the more stacked ones (most Elves and Dwarves, for example), assuming there was a fixed "race and culture" budget. But my experience, as I've said, is that these things are not typically done well. Usually some stuff will be unreasonably valued, either high or low, which can be particularly bad when races combine fixed and variable elements.
Re: Wood Elf ability, it would have functioned so differently in different editions that it's not reasonable to compare it. It's not particularly useful for other classes, because of 5E's action economy combined with the slightly tricky conditions for it to work. I say that having played Wood Elves, note.
