For me, it has everything to do with the setting. I‘m right with the OP...until someone mentions thri-keen on Athas, and then I’m like “well,
that’s legit.” Or Planescape, where it’s kind of
supposed to be the Mos Eisley cantina.
For me, setting is everything, and there has to be a clear understanding that D&D baseline settings have traditionally been predominantly the Tolkien-like races as the massive majority of the population. So it’s when someone wants to play a thri-kreen on Oerth, or a tiefling on Krynn, or a dragonborn..well, anywhere...that it throws everything off for me.
So if I were playing in Eberron, sure make that party of weird choices, because it was designed that way, but if I’m playing in a setting that wasn’t designed that way, it bugs the crap out of me. Treating every setting as if it were Eberron means you don’t get the other experiences at all, much sh less as a baseline. And since there are a lot of new younger players (who did
not grow up saturated with just elves and dwarves, but grew up with weird races, so it’s not even something new for them) they are coming into D&D and seeing all that weird fun presented to them as the default rather than as, well,
weird! Id prefer if they got a chance to see what the classic settings looked like, so they can choose what settings to use for what story ideas, rather than just get the idea that D&D is supposed to be a kitchen sink menagerie on every setting by default
.
Now, when we played our online monk game, we purposefully took animalistic races: Aarakocra, Tabaxi, Tortle. BUT the idea for the campaign was there existed an "animal kingdom" continent (sort of like Zootopia) in part of the world where animal-races flourished and were the norm. So, in that setting, such races get some looks outside of their own lands, but everyone knows of the kingdom and understand where they are from.
I might have to borrow that idea. Sounds like a really cool idea for a world...in Spelljammer!