Would Variant human be more balanced if you only got one +1 ability score bonus with a feat? That way, you can still get 16 in your main stat, but now you're sacrificing much more for the feat, similar to normal choose-ASI-or-feat level ups...
They are already sacrificing things for the feat. They dont get darkvision, they dont get any neat racial feature or spells at certain levels like the elves or tieflings do. They get 2 stat points and they get a feat
They are already sacrificing things for the feat, true. But a lot of people still think Variant humans are overpowered; thus there's an argument that they're not sacrificing enough.
It hardly changes anything tbh. Variant humans are not overpowered, but incredibly useful should you run a build that requires a handful of feats, such as Polearm Master + Sentinel. Granted, some of the feats such as Sharpshooter are incredibly powerful, but it's very likely the only feat you are going to get, which makes your variant human boil down to +4 stats total (because instead of taking this feat as say an elf, you will just put points into stats) It's really comparable to other races, you are trading the darkvision for a tiny bit more power early on. Now the elephant in the room, the Lucky feat is different. The balance issue lies with the Lucky feat itself, rather than Human grabbing it.
In a lot of games I play in/run, we let all players get a free feat at 1st level (variant humans get 2). This helps players who want to build a feat-heavy build but don't want to be a human, and adds some flavor to characters who would choose ASIs over feats at every 4th level. I highly doubt Larian is going to add this, but it would match their philosophy of "allow characters to have more options/abilities than 5e rules allow"... If they're concerned about balance, they can do as Stabbey suggested and restrict the "more powerful" feats to level 4.
