“Dungeons & Dragons will continue to fail unless—or until—they fundamentally change their approach to race,” said tabletop RPG designer Connie Chang.
Fail at what? Being the #1, greatest selling and most recognizable TTRPG of all time, specially now more than ever? Words either mean something or they don't, and these people are clearly pulling their words right out of their ass to paint their own imaginary version of reality, the way they want it to be. The only time D&D has ever even remotely approached the realm of being a "failure" was when it shot itself in the foot during the 4e era, and maybe briefly in the 90s when Vampire gained popularity, and even then it was still #2. So not a failure even then, just not #1.
This is all imaginary nonsense baked for clickbait outrage with no basis in reality but their own delusions.
By the way, I absolutely love all the changes to race they made in the Unearthed Arcana: Character Origins document*. I was hesitant about them at first, cuz I hate the rationale behind eliminating racial ability modifiers, but from a purely game mechanics perspective prefer they way it frees us to make any character build we want without being bound by racial modifiers as a limiting factor for viability.
I do think that there are mechanical issues with tying ability bonuses to Background specifically, though, since it incentivizes picking backgrounds with bonuses that match your class's key ability, or going with the custom Background option, which defeats the point of tying them to background. They should just give everyone a +2 bonus to one or two abilities of choice and leave it at that, or maybe make players pick the bonuses from either race, class and background, like I did when trying it out in my own game.
But other than that I prefer the new treatment for races—including the addition of Orcs as a standard race—and it's what I'd use from now on.
"EDIT/PS: Except for Ardlings. I absolutely hate that stupid furry-angel concept they pulled out of nowhere. It's like they didn't know WTF to do with Aasimar, so lets just make them furries. Cuz furries have a lot to do with angels, amirite?
I'd just make them Aasimar that look like angels and drop that stupid "Ardling" name and concept. You don't need to make angels furries to make them cool, you just need to make them angels.