Sure, but my problem is that "Lawful vs Chaotic" becomes really weird, to the point of not making sense. If someone wanted to really make an argument that alignment is not lore, they'd pull out what
@tetrasodium did because I have no idea how the heck elves of all stripes and colors are listed at "Chaotic" when they generally live in ordered empires of some sort.
Law vs Chaos originally represented a more cosmic struggle, that's why it was very hard to explain Neutral once the good-evil axis was introduced. Back before 1e Law vs Chaos represented "Good vs. Evil" in the sense of Order vs Entropy and as presented in Moorcock's works like Elric. Chaos was unabashedly associated with demons and dark gods while Law was associated with angels and gods we would call good. Law was Camelot and Chaos was Mad Max. A lot like Warhammer Fantasy Battles or Age of Sigmar. Warhammer, the strategy battle game, not the RPG necessarily, gave a great example of how this struggle worked on a cosmic scale. It was a common trope.
Neutrality therefore had a goal, it was a bonafide alignment beyond I don't care. Mordenkainen was/is the prime example of this as he sought to keep the balance of Law vs Chaos in check throughout the Flanaess. This is also why Druid's were Neutral as well, they were keeping the balance between nature and progress, the wilds vs cities, so that society didn't encroach too much on the forces of nature. Within these contexts they made sense. Even alignment languages made sense in that CHaos was what we would call infernal or abyssal and Law would be Celestial, as two examples.
4e kinda understood this except it didn't understand that pivot point represented by Neutral as a fulcrum that helped to maintain the world. With it's simplified alignment and origin for the Abyss it played right into the Law vs Chaos paradigm with the Elemental CHaos & Astral Sea. The 5 steps of Alignment made sense in the idea of these alignments representing a characters morality. Lawful Good, Good representing the Law of the original game, Evil and Chaotic Evil representing the Chaos axis. Unaligned was in general representative of how CHaotic Neutral seemed to play as opposed to it's intent. This implementation of ALignment failed to account for the intent behind neutral in pre-D&D weird fiction like Moorcock and others who followed similar ideas in their work like Pratchett.
Since 2e Alignment in AD&D has been very different. Arguably since mid 1e. Gygax's removal from TSR shifted the game to a much more story driven game. I think it would have gone that way either way though. With that shift alignment turned into a straight jacket. We see these arguments play out in forums such as a Paladin must obey the law of the land and that kind of thing which is not actually representative of Lawful Good even in the sense of of the way late 1e and 2e, even 3e, presented Alignments. Lawful Good is Captain America, doing what is right, self sacrifice and integrity. In ethics the Lawful Good alignment would be Deontology, the practice of prioritizing duty above all else regardless of consequences. Deontology is doing what is "right". That's just one example though. ALignments represent, now, ethical questions and how you would respond to them as presented in 2e and later. It should never have been presented as a straight jacket for behavior.
That's why I am kind of in favor for removing them and noting when something is Evil or Good in their description, even if it is a culture because as I have demonstrated, there are even real world examples of evil cultures and societies.
