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Notes -
More digital ink should be spilled on the effect of the show Critical Role on the overall hobby. For those who don't know, Critical Role is a show run by voice actor Matt Mercer about him running D&D with a group of players who are all themselves actors. It is wildly popular, with each 4-hour episode pulling in an average of a million views, and has brought countless people into D&D. It is one of the big contributors to the game becoming as mainstream as it is.
The politics of the creators and its fanbase are easily identifiable. At risk of sounding low-effort, Matt Mercer's twitter bio contains both his preferred pronouns and a BLM hashtag. I say this because those things are symbols of commitment to specific ideas, and this is generally reflected by the show's fans. To see a very quick and simple example: look at this article, where the writer expresses her disappointment that a group of white players would publicly play in a fantasy setting based off of nonwhite cultures for their upcoming adventure. This line emphasizes both the lengths the creator goes to be racially sensitive, and the feelings of his audience.
This is not to say that Matt Mercer isn't liked by his audience, far from it. I'm simply trying to illustrate the general social and political leaning of him and his audience. If you want more examples, I can produce them.
I mentioned how the show has brought droves of fans to play D&D and join its comunity. To put it simply, you can't bring in such a huge number of people without it vastly changing the culture of the hobby. Like it or not, people who think like the writer make up a substantial amount of the playerbase for Dungeons and Dragons now, possibly the majority. This culture is endorsed and amplified by the creators of the game, Wizards of the Coast, who have the same politics. The racial controversy you bring up is a very natural and obvious result of this cultural shift coming into tension with the old culture of the game. If you're feeling like the hobby isn't as much for you anymore, that's because it probably isn't.
Many players are fleeing to stuff like OSR, where the gameplay tries to emulate an older era and the culture is resistant to changes like this. I still play D&D, but I use my own setting, add my own homebrew, use my own races, and most importantly run my own game. I use D&D for its rules, but since 5E is basically a combat simulator, so you have to do a lot of work to make the exploration and interaction robust.
But that's the fun of D&D and tabletop. You can do your own thing with your own people. It doesn't affect me what WOTC does with their races and published adventures, since I don't use those. If you don't know people or don't DM, the outlook is less rosy.
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