Um, to get off my hobby horse for a second, World of Warcraft most definitely has dwarves?
My apologies. I meant halflings. Which don't exist in TES, WoW, or GW1/2. They do exist in FFXIV (in part because Final Fantasy
blatantly steals from D&D, it literally has mindflayers and beholders.)
Dwarves "exist" in FFXIV as a variant of halflings; they
used to exist in the ancient past of TES, as a (very very weird) variant of
elves; and technically still exist as non-playable stone-people in GW2 whose civilization has been (essentially) dead for thousands of years.
Elves don't exist in GW1/2, and the closest equivalent is...wait for it...
sentient fruit,* who are specifically so young as a race that they don't even truly have a proper understanding of death yet. It's straight-up a plot point for them that Riannoc, one of the Firstborn, was also the first of their race to
die. They don't even know if they die of old age yet, because none of them are old enough to have found out! They're about as un-Tolkienesque as you can get while still aesthetically pinging the "elf" vibes.
Point being, even the allegedly "always there" races
are not always there. Only humans come close to meeting that standard...and even they aren't guaranteed.
*I am being somewhat facetious, but properly speaking, sylvari are born from flower-pods, so they are
technically sentient fruit.
I suppose it depends on how many of your friends this is in your strawman.
It's not a strawman. It's quite a reasonable interpretation. Because, guess what, I actually have Jewish, Muslim, and vegan friends, and more than a few friends who have unusual allergies or bad food reactions. (One example, the person who plays the bard in my Dungeon World game has a bad food reaction to bell pepper: it causes mouth bleeding.)
Of course, none of us could actually meet up for a dinner party, since none of those friends lives within even 300 miles of me, let alone close enough to just plan a meetup with. But the point stands: this "artistic vision" is rather exclusionary, not just "setting limits" but outright forbidding quite a few popular things. As I said previously, turns out "my way or the highway" ultimatums tend to wear thin over time. People respond rather more positively to sincere, good-faith discussion and efforts to find effective solutions that satisfy all parties, not just one party insistently enforcing their way on everyone else.