And, I will note, I openly and unreservedly hate the entire first paragraph of this section, and have ever since we first saw it. Because it is a blatant contravention of the claimed "D&D is a toolkit" claim--and actively working to suppress entirely legitimate player interests.
If D&D is actually a toolkit, NO race is guaranteed. Not elves, dwarves, halflings...or even humans. Dwarves don't exist in two of the most popular fantasy video game franchises of all time (WoW and TES, though in the latter they are extinct rather than totally non-existent). Neither do halflings. The second most popular fantasy MMO doesn't have dwarves (except as a variant of halflings!), and the (arguable) third most popular barely has dwarves and doesn't have elves. Humans are the only thing that even approaches being a given, and even they aren't truly guaranteed.
But no, the authors just had to enshrine the Core Four as present in every universe and ghettoize the rest. Gotta get those "demn kids, get off my lawn" points, apparently.
Good. It should never have been there in the first place. Instead of wasting page space on bull$#¡† Traditional Gameplay Enforcement, they could have actually treated 5e like a toolkit. Could have shown how different slates of races can be used to emphasize themes, support different player interests, and/or explore social interactions between genuinely different physiologies or lifespans etc. But of course we couldn't have actually useful guidance in the core books. That would be bad...somehow.
Though it is false to claim, as many have done in this thread, that such things are the one and only way to achieve such ends. I have been specifically, without prompting, thanked by my players privately for the internal consistency and understandability of the world we run in, on separate occasions by two different players. I do not use hard "no absolutely not you cannot play that and will not have any opportunities to discuss it." But that doesn't mean the world of Jewel of the Desert is some timey-wimey ball of stuff.
Ahh, gotta love the catch-22. It's straight up "you must have 10 years experience in the field to get an entry level job in the field," just applied to a D&D race. It's not as old as Tolkien, so it couldn't possibly have as many examples as Tolkien's work has generated, so it won't be allowed, meaning it won't get more new examples.
Self-perpetuating exclusion.
Hyperbole, much?
Viking hat DMing is all the rage today. With textual support, even! You're just finally noticing that that style of DMing is not well-liked by a lot of players.
Turns out the "my way or the highway" attitude eventually starts seeing more than a few people choose the highway. Shocking!
Couldn't put it better myself.
D&D was once about embracing the fantastic and the strange, about fueling imagination and derring-do, about effusive creativity. The freedom for DMs to explore any possible world they could conjure up, and players to find new ways to always ensure that no DM plan survived contact with them (for better or worse...)
Now? You will take only what is hard-line traditional and like it. Do not question the wisdom of the ancients. Know your place, player. Be thankful you get any game at all.
Thankfully, the pendulum has begun to swing back the other way.
