Not sure if I get the Drow and Orc part here. It's been my experience that Orcs come in all kinds of colors and Drow are blue/grey in color so nothing really analogous to any ethnicity of real life human for either of them there.

Don't get me wrong, making either of those races more complex in their behavior probably makes for better fiction but I don't see what that has to do with their current diversity drive.

This is almost certainly the brainchild of some woke corporate arse coverers who like their brethren elsewhere imagine problems that dont exist in order to assuage their personal feelings of manufactured white guilt and to score points with spineless management who are terrified than some idiot will complain and there'll be negative PR from it. They dont understand how utterly stupid it will make them look because they dont think like normal people.

Most famous dark elf? Drizzt Do'Urden anyone? The game itself wasn't "stereotypical". It was a set of rules by which you could tell stories.
If they came out stereotypical, then that's the problem of the GM and/or the players. Rolemaster said it best when it said "If a rule doesn't fit with the story, the rule can be ignored.".

..then it makes sense to clean them up. There's clearly some fiction inspired by real life racism, and you might as well fix that.

But I'm not fond of the idea that fictional groups all need to all be interchangeable - or that they all need to end up with some similar or compatible concept of correct/moral behavior.

Like, if you think it'll make your game better to have dwarves and pixies start off with the same strength... fine, go ahead. But I don't think it's wrong to go the other way. Maybe it makes your characters/game more interesting/varied if pixies are small, and that's just how it is? Maybe they can't lift big things, but they're also hard to hit? I don't think it hurts anyone to have a game/fiction like that.

Or, like, it's cool that Klingons or Ferengi have got to be more complex characters over time. They were more interesting when they were fleshed out. But the Borg stories kind of went the opposite direction - they were more interesting when they were mindless assimilation machines. I think there's place for both. If they decide Orcs are better with more variety... cool? But I'd hate to see this equivalence be taken as some general rule for fantasy settings.

So yeah.. my bold, bold take is that it's OK if your fictional groups are the same, and it's OK if they're different?

Yep, my campaigns will still have evil orcs, gnolls and goblins. This crap is going too far. I was thinking about buying the latest editions, but I won't waste my money on this 'woke' culture nonsense.

Some of us can distinguish between problems with racism and sexism in the real world, and imaginary evil monsters for heroes to defeat -- and no, I don't see an orc as a black person, or a goblin as a [pick-your-person].

This is an RPG system, not an operating system. You can't really force your users to switch by degrading it to the point where it's no longer usable, they will simply not switch to your crappy version and stick to what they know works and instead patch whatever add-ons you release to fit into their working system, or they simply forgo your additional content altogether.

I’m sure they’ll be thrilled we managed to solve the core issue of systemic racism and abuse of power by police by editing D&D. We just need to explain that rangers are basically police. Put the signs away and go home, we’ve done good here, pats on the back all around.

Please stop distracting from the core issue. Fix the police first, then we can worry about fluffy, look how woke I am, nonsense like this.

Fantasy exists on the good/evil dichotomy. If you don't like that, play RPGs with a more ambiguous morality standard like World of Darkness where nobody is actually good and even the player characters are essentially monsters who, at best, manage to justify their monstrous behaviour with the other monsters being (at least subjectively) even worse.

If you do not have evil characters the players can fight, well, they are essentially murderers. Because that's what goes down in most dungeon crawls and other RPG that the purists and elitists would consider "low roll-play": You walk into the environment of someone else and slaughter him for his treasure. That's essentially what your party of heroes is doing when going down the kobold tunnels to loot their treasure hoard: You break into the home of some group of NPCs, murder them to rob their stuff.

The only justification there really is is that, well, they are evil. And they stole it from us first so we only take back what is ours. If you do not have that justification, it's a bit like going down into the middle east to liberate us some oil. Which is only ok for pretty much the same reason, the ones having it now are evil, ok?

So if kobolds, orcs and trolls are no longer evil, well, your characters are not really any better than you are, and who'd want to play that?

I remember first picking up those books at about age 9 and recall reading a passage by Gygax near the beginning of either the PHB or DMG that specifically said he was only using "him" and "her" for the sake of ease and to keep in mind that everyone can play.
I've played some games with people who knew and worked with Gary, and I always had the impression that D&D was diverse to begin with. We were all just outcast weirdo nerds, and while we've grown up to be imperfect too I've always had a soft spot for the outcast and have never had issues with diversity in these sorts of things.

Also, a friend of mine who plays Magic in the tournament circuit says he feels that players don't seem to care, nd they mostly see it as stupid virtue signalling by a company owned by a larger toy company (Hasbro, I think?)

Good job Iron Crown is still around with Rolemaster. Where whatever you are, you can be whatever you really want. Frequently dead, because it can hurt, but it beats D&D hands down.
There's that old saying that used to do the rounds "If you go looking for trouble, you're fairly much guaranteed to find it.". If you go looking for racism in everything, you're sure to be able to find something you can say is (whether it is or not, but hey, post structural world ya know, what actually exists doesn't count,

As I pointed out above, I'm not familiar with the DnD universe, but what seems to be the case here is that the Drow are supposed to be inherently evil by birth. The purest definition of racism is that you assume the existence of distinctive immutable hereditary traits like this one.