Yup. I'd wager there while removing racist stereotypes is a big part of this push, there is an equally large part that grew up on World of Warcraft and want carte-blanche to play cute gobbos, meaty orcs, and sexy drow without the stigma of playing a "monster" race. The line between what PC races and monstrous humanoids is gone: drow, orc, goblin PCs are now going to be as common as elves, dwarves and halflings.
From what little I've seen, it seems rather more the opposite: interests are spread so thinly now that, apart from the small number of especially popular races, the formerly-dominant ones are now dropping to be similar to the mass of "former monster" options. That is, dwarves and halflings are just as much
falling down to the percentages of half-orcs and drow as it is the latter rising up to the former.
Humans remain by far the most common choice, and variations of elf (counting half-elves but not drow) remain the second most common choice. The only
real change is that tieflings and dragonborn have climbed up into the big leagues, clearly earning their 3rd and 4th places (typically tieflings in 3rd place and dragonborn in 4th, with dwarves having slowly declined over time from narrow 4th place to a clear 5th).
Time marches on. People will always love Tolkien because his work is good, but there is a significant pattern of short races being less popular than human-sized ones (no surprise there, since height is often seen as a positive trait and there are many correlations between height and other positive traits, for a host of reasons that I'd rather not dwell upon). Dragons are cool because they've always been cool, as symbols of power across dozens of cultures; and a fiend turned hero is an inherent "complex antagonist goes good" story, which is perennially popular. It's hard to argue against those as popular things, and I doubt we'll see that meaningfully change for a long time yet. It's not like D&D invented these trends of popularity!
If I have to read a paragraph or two on every monster and NPC in the game to get a general idea of how they fit into the game by default, the game rules lose significant value.
Maybe there shouldn't
be a default. Maybe it's better for us as both players and creators that we have to choose to think about it, at least once, before
creating our own default.