Emphasis added.
Honest question: Why is this a problem?
Orcs are a fantasy race, pretty much invented by JRR Tolkien, who based them off of Goblins and a few other things, but upon their creation, they were supposed to be evil, brutish savages. That's really their entire raison d'être, to act as purely bad villains and antagonists. If they are described a certain way, I don't really see the issue. They are supposed to be evil, enemies of pretty much every good race, so of course that will find its way into the sourcebooks. What harm does this do? I find it incredibly idiotic to pretend the fluff description of some fantasy race having any kind of negative impact on the perception of irl races, no matter how long and loud Twitter cries over this shit. Again: What words do they use that makes you think of Goebbels and why is that a problem? The connection between orcs and black people is not in the books, it's in the heads of idiots.
And to give my 2 cents to the change of orcs in general and to fit a modern political narrative (even though there is no connection between orcs and racism whatso-fucking-ever) in particular, I find it inherently boring and lame when orcs are turned into some sort of noble, misunderstood warrior culture, which is good (or at least neutral) at heart, but they clash with other races due to misunderstandings or cultural misconceptions and... yadda yadda fucking yadda.
Classic, evil Tolkien orcs are so much more interesting than any attempt to "modernize" them. I just find the idea of some race being so tormented and twisted by some evil being (in this case Sauron), that they become inherently und irrevocably tarnished themselves pretty rad as a concept - especially in a fantasy setting where good and evil aren't just arbitrary moral concepts, but actually sides in an eternal conflict. With such orcs, you can see what happens to creatures that become subjugated by the forces of evil. If that doesn't raise the stakes, I don't know what does.
Strangely enough, I find most attempts to add cultural depth to make them more interesting only having the adverse effect of making them boring. This is not just a DnD thing, a German system by the name of "The Dark Eye" has orcs, who follow the "noble savage trope" and by adding that kind of moral ambiguity, they just make orcs a whole lot less cool and intriguing. That alone makes me somewhat hostile towards these new (optional) changes. It takes away from the races, and I fear that it will turn them into barely defined slop in the long run. I genuinely fear that orcs, dwarves and so on will become entirely blank slates, where the player merely chooses the race like it was a pair of pants and purely cosmetic.
After all, this might just be optional at the moment, but it shows what trajectory WOTC is on now. This will find its way into future systems one way or the other, and chances are, the classic rules will become optional or even obsolete. If it allows a bit of flexibility for stats, that's fine, but I don't think it'll stop at that. The rhetoric behind this isn't "We want to make the game more flexible", it came across wearing the mantle of SJW-speak, so some people being weary is understandable.
These rules being optional also doesn't mean I can ignore them if my group decides to use them. I don't want to give up playing with them over such a minor thing, but it does take away from the fun nonetheless.
A bit of homebrewing is always a good idea to tailor the game to the groups needs and wants, but when you're forced to homebrew too much, you quickly wonder why you're not just picking up a game system that more closely resembles what you want. It's a shame so many people just stick with DnD 5e out of laziness. There are great systems out there and if you're willing to heavily homebrew, you might as well go for a more freeform system and adapt that, instead of stubbornly fixing everything about a system that you dislike.
1. Marketing- people in the US have a deeply culturally-ingrained aversion to that sort of language, especially in certain areas of the US and in certain ethnic groups (yes, Orcs are not supposed to be a stand-in for any actual ethnic group, but I'm not going to act like that doesn't mean that, say, a Native American has no right to feel mildly uncomfortable about Orcs being described as barely-sentient savages that do nothing but kill, rape, and bellow and should be disposed for the sake of the more civilized races when nearly the exact same sort of language was used to characterize their nation 150 years ago shortly before they were pushed to the brink of total genocide). WOTC wants to sell to a big, broad audience, so they're going to get rid of the language that might alienate people
regardless of its intentions. The intentions don't matter- the fact that they push people away is the problem.
2. Well, that comes down to aesthetic preferences- personally, I find always-evil mortal races to be incredibly boring. Vampires and werewolves always being evil makes sense because they're under a literal, magical curse that compels them to prey on the weak and innocent. Fiends always being evil (save for some weird fringe case of direct divine intervention, akin to all of the Chinese gods that used to be demons until another god/Buddha beat the shit out of them) makes sense because they are direct metaphysical manifestations of the concept of evil.
The thing about evil is that each person has to
choose evil personally- that's a key part of the Christian morality that implicitly forms the root of D&D's morality system. This idea is why one of Tolkien's biggest regrets in writing LOTR (if you don't believe me, read his letters yourself!) was that he didn't indicate that Orcs had the potential to be good inside of them. If someone has the
potential for good, but chooses evil anyways, they have the potential for complex and dynamic portrayal- if something just
is evil, if doing evil is something no more in their power to choose as a wolf has the power to choose not to savage a man- then they really can't be any more complex than a wolf. If you just want a very simple moral dichotomy, I can see the appeal, but you're talking about how
intriguing always-evil Orcs are, and I can't get that.
I also think you're setting up this false dichotomy here, where the only options are having Orcs be a very one-dimensional "they only think of raiding and raping and nothing else" view or you don't have them be evil at all, when you can have Orcs still have a culture built around bloodshed and brutality without the theoretical Orc raised from infancy by monks in the Church of the Christ-Analogue just randomly murderraping everyone in the monastery once they reach maturity because always-evil.
3. I doubt that even WOTC will completely dissolve the identity of the races, because even the literal tri-tone hair nonbinary SJW who plays D&D I know at work likes the stereotypical haughty elf, dour dwarf, puckish gnome, etc. Once again: the industry is chasing a buck, not intentionally destroying everything you love.
If you want to explain what you find intriguing about always-evil Orcs, I'd actually love to hear it.
On a sidenote, I kinda wonder, are there horrorstories out there about players getting into trouble for playing "bigotted" characters?
I can't help but imagine that DnD communities online and offline are now overflowing with people bitching about how some dwarf-character is "totally racist against elves and I am literally shaking rn".
I've never heard of this, and I probably have a lot more non-fleeting interaction with people that'd be labeled "Radical Leftist" or "SJW" than most people on this site. I suspect it's happened, but it probably isn't meriting the word "overflowing" by a country mile.
You need to remember the kinds of people you see on the Farms are a minority in a minority in a minority, and do not represent anything close to the average person- if they did, this site wouldn't exist.
