...in celebration of the Legend of Drizzt, WotC is revamping much of the lore surrounding the “dark elves”
...and making everything that made Drizzt a hero worthy of celebration completely moot.
...a deep-voiced reimagining of Drizzt’s origin story, voiced by none other than popular Sherlock actor Benedict Cumberbatch."
InB4 people start complaining that this is being voiced by a white guy.
Now you might be wondering, why now? Perhaps because Wizards of the Coast is trying to reckon with their forty-odd year history and the implications that all drow are evil just because, or even that all drow follow Lolth and are all on board with being evil, with the “lone exception” of Drizzt, aka the Model Minority.
Then WotC is several decades too late, cuz the idea of non-evil drow has already been covered in other TSR era products before WotC came along, with the worship of Eilistrae and details for playing non-evil drow (or even non-evil members of other "evil" races) that have existed since the onset. Somehow I was able to play a "good" Eilistrae worshipping drow almost 30 years ago without WotC ever getting involved. I even played versions of her in NWN servers and the only thing people ever gave me crap about what that she has chocolate-brown skin and "Dark Elves are supposed to be Smurfs not Brownies". But none among the hardcore RP/canon-minded crowd ever questioned the presence of an Eilistrae worshipping good drow.
Besides, the entire reason that Drizzt shines is precisely BECAUSE he's the exception (not the "lone" exception, just the most famous one), which would all be undone now.
I hope that this is just the first step, and that the days of “all evil” races are gone."
The days of “all evil” races practically never existed, since there have always been exceptions to almost everything, except magical creatured creates to be inherently evil, which excludes practically every intelligent race.
The more Elves the better in my opinion.
Now we can have Drow, Snow Drow and Wood Drow.
Yeah. What I get from the article is that the cult of Lolth drow are unchanged.
Except that the "cult of Lolth" was the norm, and now it's being reframed as the exception and relegated just to Menzoberranzan, like it never existed outside of it and people never had reason to fear the drow were it not for that place.
This comes down to how one wants monocultural races. I feel like in a setting which is a region of only a smattering of countries like Harn or the on-screen parts of Middle Earth, then monocultural races aren't a big deal. Humans are mostly monocultural as well. But if one has a full Earth-sized globe with radically different human cultures - or a multiverse of many worlds - then monocultural races don't fit well.
I think having options for different cultures of elves is a good thing. When a game world spans everything from arctic tundra to teeming rainforest, I think it's nice to have the option that the elves on opposite sides of the world have varying culture instead of all having the same language, customs, and religion.
Races have never been monocultural in D&D. Even to the extent that you might claim that the distinctions were weak or not well developed, they were always specified nonetheless. Drows even had mentions of multiple cities with worship of other gods within the Realms since decades ago. This is an imaginary problem (in multiple levels, since it's also based on inserting racist associations that were never there and getting offended about FICTIONAL racism even if it was) based on a false framing of what things were actually like.