D&D 5E (2024) Unconfirmed Dark Sun World Book

[Phantom_Miria]

what assumption can I take away from that other than "People want them to bring in early 90s style racism so bad even Games Workshop went away from it"?

I don't think I'm following here.
If the "Games Workshop went away from it" line is about their Pygmies then it wasn't the early '90s but the mid '80s, Warhammer Pygmies were shockingly racist even by the '80s standards because if you dare google them up you'll see they look like something that would have been considered heavily stereotyped even in the 1930s, and anyhow there's thankfully absolutely nothing in Dark Sun that ever looked close to that stuff.
Dark Sun Halflings aren't a reference to any given real human culture at all, they're just a fantasy race who eats other intelligent races, and they aren't unique either. They just became something that was taken notice off because of how different Athasian Halflings were compared to the usually peaceful Halflings of more normal fantasy settings.

Warhammer Pygmies were so bad that they lasted 4 years from 1984 to 1988, and the only reason they passed under the radar at all I think was because the English writers were far less sensitized to that stuff than the Americans, and Pygmies were a very minor subset of troops inside other Warhammer armies, and GW was tiny at the time. As soon as someone realized what that stuff looked like they were quickly shoved in the memory hole, and rightfully so.
Athasian Halflings, or anything in Dark Sun at all, isn't even remotely comparable in my opinion.

 

[Mecheon]

Yeah, but there being cannibalism at all is apparently too offensive for some people.

The giant praying mantids eating a guy doesn't reflect on people and its "well, that's a giant praying mantis". I don't see people having problems with that much in the same way no one really cares about lizardfolk doing the same.

The small jungle-living half-sized people being described as 'cannibal savages' is a problem, especially when they have their whole other things one can dig into that, frankly, is a lot more interesting. The whole ancient biomancy empire and all

Dark Sun Halflings aren't a reference to any given real human culture at all, they're just a fantasy race who eats other intelligent races, and they aren't unique either. They just became something that was taken notice off because of how different Athasian Halflings were compared to the usually peaceful Halflings of more normal fantasy settings.

They are slamming face first into those stereotypes per the art of them posted up thread. Probably not as bad as some of the other stuff TSR pulled, sure, but that's where a lot of Dark Sun's problems can hit

Which. They don't even need to do that. The allure of 'oh the king sweet totally-not-hobbits are now eating people' isn't even the funny shaking up of type these days given halflings have been stereotyped as shifty rogues for longer than their old stereotypes and the other stuff they did with them later was always more interesting.

 

[Necropolitan]

The small jungle-living half-sized people being described as 'cannibal savages' is a problem, especially when they have their whole other things one can dig into that, frankly, is a lot more interesting. The whole ancient biomancy empire and all

Easily fixed by just having it be some of them that are cannibals, same as what was done with the rest of the species formerly treated as being 'evil' entirely as a culture.

Make it so they can be as good or evil as anyone else but one of the evil groups of them practices cannibalism.