So which creatures do you exclude and why? And is it something you decide on ahead of time or something you decide as you prep events/adventures?
Let's see...
Elves and Drow. They chose
their last battlefield and I don't have to deal with them anymore.
No "half" races (kinda), you can have a halfling and a dwarf for parents, but you favor one over the other. I do have half-elves, sort of, but they are people (humans, dwarves, whatever) who happen to have an elvish blood line that manifests. No dragonborn, lizardfolk instead. No gnomes.
The only non-corporeal undead are shadows and ghosts. The scary undead are nazgul types.
The only giants are stone and cloud, and they're obvious cousins.
The only dragons are basically red and black, and they can be any alignment. Vengeful greedy, usually. I just stopped being jazzed by a variety of color-coded breath weapons. Two that I came to appreciate and could run with was fire, because that's just what dragons do. I could also see a lesser sea dragon version that coughed out a noxious bile.
I don't have a lot of humanoid opposition. The vatborn are reskinned orcs and ogres. Goblins are fae, hobgoblins are humans from a parallel dimension, no bugbears. I use gnolls, minotaurs, and skaven as the "wizard did it" magical races, with lizardfolk and kobolds as the scalely folk. That's about it for humanoids. I don't need 30 humanoid races, a dozen will do.
No cursed lycanthropes, and people with that as a heritage are very few and far between. I always appreciated Eberron changelings, but they don't quite have a place yet.
Anything that could fit into an ecosystem, magical or otherwise I can use, although I give morkoths and ixtixiclixal the pass. No tritons or sea elves. Sahauguin and locathah are enough.