I really think people blow this crying about Orcs out of proportion, there was NEVER an actually interesting villain in this game whose reasons of being a villain boil down only to "I'm an Orc, Goblin, Drow or other evil race". And saying a whole species is inherently evil effectively diminishes all evil they do because you are saying they never could choose not to do it, which reduces them to children who don't know better. People should move on and stop flooding my yt feed with identical videos repeating the same points.
Yes. Simply put, yes, this was 1000% the right choice for WotC to make, and fuck them for not making it 30 years earlier.
Zero questions here, the only tables I stayed at long term were the ones where orcs and elves and humans had a precisely equal chance of being good or evil. The ones I left? The DMs and players who wanted an instant, easy 'kill this' marker were invariably super bigoted in the real world too.