Let's be honest here...the races need some kind of rebalancing. Humans are terrible; so are halflings for example. Why not add something extra to them even if it is not officially in the player's handbook such as halfling luck being a +1 to any roll and humans getting extra proficiency points. Obviously not everyone is going to powerplay but it is only fair.
We must be playing different games! How are Humans and Halflings terrible? The latter have the Lucky trait which is the best racial trait in all of DnD-dom. Humans are as they should be: Flexible and pretty good at everything. Variant humans not only break with the philosophy about human being the all-rounders, they are also blatantly OVERPOWERED and pretty much becomes the best at everything (at least in the early levels).
Humans and Halflings being some of the best races from a mechanical standpoint gets brushed aside a lot because their strengths are overshadowed by the flashier situational abilities of other races.
I actually sort of hope that the coming Lineage rules coming with Tasha's would have been implemented here, but oh well.
But, yes, D&D classes and races are not balanced against each other. D&D 5e lacks a central benchmark average around which to build templates, so everything is sort of eyeballed. I tried to do an analysis at one point to find a central point around which races were built but I failed to even get out of one race and its subraces.
This isn't so much of a problem in 5e as it was in earlier games, because there's a lot of narrative mechanics in 5e that make it possible to work around the mechanical issues. Also D&D sort of encourages a party-build philosophy where you build you character accounting for and in response to what other characters have.
For example, if your Cleric is a Trickery cleric or War cleric or Light cleric, then you might decide to take Cure Wounds on your Ranger or Bard because those types of clerics tend to be less heal-focused. If you have a Paladin, you might build with the idea of tight formation to take advantage of the Paladin's auras.
