5e Basic also has no Detect evil. Standard game though Detect Evil is the weirdest yet. It does not detect evil at all? It detects Abberrants, Fiends, etc. WTF???
I'm not familiar with 5e, but that's one of the variations on detect evil that's always made a lot of sense, from a game standpoint. In D&D, the Outer Planes are the alignment planes, each inhabited by, infused by, and iconic exemplars of the 8/9/17 alignments. The Abyss isn't just another place, which happens to be where some crazy bad creatures live. No, it's the place that embodies the Chaotic Evil alignment, and demons are the flag-bearers of CE.
More than that, the creatures of the Outer Planes, and the planes themselves, are divine. Some are literally angels, and others are creatures adapted from various mythologies, but in both implied and explicit ways, they're spiritual rather than fully material beings. Demons don't just happen to be CE, they are made of the literal manifestation of CE. They, along with the other Lower Planes and their natives, detect as evil not because of their actions, but because of their essence.
The reason this is useful design decision is because it removes the onus of judging individual actions from the DM and players -- demons are evil by their very nature. That means it's a definitional, rather than a legalistic, determination. Which has real advantages in the real world, because everyone has their own moral framework, which means the moral assumptions of different gamers are always going to conflict. Are orcs naturally evil, and is killing their babies justified? What makes a paladin fall? Those are sloppy questions, and different people have different answers. But by defining evil as metaphysical, it removes those quandaries. Evil means you're from the Lower Planes, or you get your power from there (like a cultist of Orcus). That's easy and straightforward to determine, almost mechanical.