I'd be lying if I said I didn't have tons of fun playing 5e still because ultimately I'm playing with people who are fun to play with. Despite all its problems, 5e still facilitates fun experiences. I think you run into problems if you're relying on nuContent because they seem incapable of making something that doesn't feel contrived or neutered or watered down politically in some way or another, or at least in a way that doesn't immediately rip you out of the immersion.
Trust me, my group is fun as shit to play with, we're all IRL friends that love to mess with each other and stuff. My gripe with current year 5e is how it's pushing for more "safe space" shit for trannies and such, and while it's genuinely fun taking fagshit and rewriting it, it gets annoying at points. Especially with how "with us or against us" 5e is these days with the DND community; you're either a "outdated cishet", or a "Critical Roll faggot", and it's difficult to find a middle ground at points. Whole thing's turned into a glorified pissing contest between two groups of retards, honestly.
Semi-related tangent, I've never even watched Critical Roll; only thing I know about it are that it apparently has fags in it.
It is not a coincidence that the most fun we've been having is using shit from 2nd and 3.5 edition or is just homebrew. That said, I think more recent books like Storm King's Thunder and Curse of Strahd are mostly pretty good for what they are but again, all this stuff lives and dies on your group and if you have a shitty group you're going to have a shitty time no matter how good or poor your source material is (game system or otherwise).
I prefer 3e's Dark Sun (because post-apocalypse) or D20 Modern/Urban Arcana (because urban fantasy) myself; also a bit of 4e, since that's where I started at. Only reason why I'm sticking with 5e at all at this point is because I've got plenty of shit to do with it at this point, and admittedly because I do somewhat enjoy the tears of the pissbabies on either side.
Sandy Petersen wrote a Cthulhu Mythos supplement for 5e which you could spice things up with. I would also try Glenn Welch's free 5e Mystara supplement if you're looking for a time tested but relatively unknown setting and he has a ton of lore videos on his YT channel.
I'll need to check out that Cthulhu supplement sometime; got a few Lovecraft/Cosmic Horror plots I'd like to run when I get the chance. Funnily enough, Welch's take on the Radiant Citadel was actually one of the bigger influences on my anti-RC stories; small world, huh?
I'm not much of a DnD player because my obsessive friends live far away and refuse to play online but I'd choose the Tabaxi and try to salvage it. Lots of anthropomorphic felines in cartoons, comics, myths, other TTRPGs and horror movies to steal from. I was actually fixing to watch The Cat Creature tonight. The last character I played was a cleric of Abbathor, the Dwarven god of greed. Too bad it was a homebrew setting and half of my backstory had to be tossed out.
I'll try to keep the Tabaxi suggestion in mind. The annual campaign I mentioned restricts races to mostly core races, with a few others like Warforged or Tabaxi; my friend group has told me, to my face, that I'm probably one of the few people that plays a monster race as an actual monster and not someone's glorified fursona, so that's what I was going with here. I was going to run a Dragonborn, but... let's just say I know a scalie IRL. That, and 5e Dragonborn really don't have much going for them.
Concerning Tabaxi and Tieflings:
For the cats, I've actually seen a rather large chunk of anti-woke/right-wing feline characters in fiction, and I do have a few ideas in mind for them. It's just that I don't have much interest in them outside of political jokes; comparing trannies to hyenas and rats is fun for a few campaigns, but it can get stale after a while. There are plenty of catfolk characters in fiction that I could take inspiration from, but... I dunno, I think I've just had to deal with furfaggots way too much on my end to properly think about it just yet. Still, they're a solid "safe" option, and I'll be happy to run one if the Tiefling doesn't work out.
Meanwhile, the "Tiefniggers" as they're called here actually have quite a bit going for them; aside from taking symbols of degeneracy and turning them into anti-woke characters, I've had some genuine fun taking the whole "half-demon" connection and developing it. Aside from the "cursed blood" bit being an opportunity to flesh out the lore of demons and such in DND, I've also had a few laugh riots using it as an excuse to go murderhobo on some fags; sometimes, it's just fun to play a monster, especially when it's the "based" option like the Dark Urge. All that, and the updated lore bits from the 2024 PHB means that you can make a proper fiend character now, instead of someone's DeviantArt OC.
Still, Tieflings do have a negative reputation among some players for a reason, and the 2024 PHB's original version of them didn't help.