A very spicy take: the fact that the most recent edition of D&D is willing to countenance nonbinary elves but repeats racist hackery from a decade ago about orcs is not a coincidence.

Part of this is, of course, that elves are already understood to be androgynous and thus it's more acceptable to say that the swishy fey god Corellon is genderfluid than to say that big smashy Gruumsh is genderfluid.

But another part of this is that there are certain things that get pushback from the D&D fanbase (especially the extremely online fanbase) and certain things which do not.

The 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons codified a class named "Warlord" that had healing/buffing powers and used swords and axes and bows and so on. It also added a Bard spell, "Vicious Mockery", where you charge a daring diss with magic and it causes the target psychic damage.

Vicious Mockery is part of 5th edition. Warlords are not. Both of them were mocked for being silly, but the fanbase was willing to accommodate killer insults, but was not willing to accommodate healers that don't use explicit magic.

The fanbase is willing to accommodate swishy nonbinary elves, but they are not willing to accommodate a default assumption that there are no inherently evil natural creatures (let alone the true radicalism of eliminating inherently evil supernatural creatures, or alignment!)

In fact, they're effectively even more conservative than that, because if D&D just made orcs and goblins less racist but kept, like, fish people and frog people as inherently evil still, there would be substantially fewer complaints. But it seems like they won't.

It's easy to get caught up in relatively facile criticisms like John Tynes's Power Kill, which don't really reflect the primary style of play for most Dungeons and Dragons groups. This is a mistake, because by placing the standard at "engaging in race riots/genocidal violence,"

the end result is to excuse play wherein the assumption that orcs are just naturally evil continues to play a role, even if the party never actually carries out any acts of mass slaughter or goes through with the appalling "paladin faced with a baby orc" scenario.

But, of course, if you turn over the rock of examining this type of racism, then you start wondering about all those "racial" homelands, wherein everyone has a "natural" home where their communities are...

Which, okay, maybe elves do live in forests (D&D elves don't universally, but whatever), but forests are freakin' everywhere. There's no reason to have an "Elf Kingdom" unless you want a world where racial segregation is natural and racial integration is strange and new.

Tolkien did this, and, well, let's be clear- Tolkien sincerely believed that racial segregation was natural and racial integration was a disruption. His opinions on the morality of that situation are maybe a bit more complex than that of a KKK member. But he still believed it.