It isn't about being the very best that no one ever was. It is about leveling the playing field so that the disparity in power between racial choices isn't as severe.
The people who min/max to the highest degree were always gonna do that with their tortle barbarians, yuan-ti sorcerers, and variant human anything. All this does is allow roleplayers to make their unorthodox roleplay concepts a little more mechanically viable.
The difference being that since Tasha's is an official rulebook it can be added to DnDBeyond, which will help me quite a lot as I do all my DnD online. It'll also help people in Adventure League and, as is relevant in this discussion, can be added to Baldur's Gate 3 as an officially supported character creation rule.
So. Yah. Not everyone needs Wizards' permission, but HAVING that permission at all is still nice.
Not trying to be argumentative but why does it have to be a level playing field? Why can't some races outperform in certain areas? For instance, let's use the orc wizard as an example. I assume people roll an orc wizard mainly to roleplay since the orc (I think) racial traits are not that useful to a wizard. People roleplay orcs because of the potential conflicts that may arise. If that's the core reason, why the need to min max our stats? An 18 vs 20 is a minor difference after a couple of ASIs but it seems like everyone needs that 20.
People tend to follow RAW if they can. That way if you happen to play in a different table, you don't have to concern yourself with a bunch of homebrew. It allows the game to be consistent. So yes, I agree, you don't need permission but it's better if the official rules were followed by all.
Generally, in a session you want ever character have a chance to shine. A level playing field can help in that greatly, especially if you are running a very combat focused campaign. Going back to the earlier example, if a player picked an orc wizard and so only has a 13 in intelligence cause pointbuy, that hurts him significantly. Everyone else will have a +1 to +2 difference in their bonuses to attacking and he might even find that enemies have an easier time passing his spell DCs because of his lack of intelligence. This could make it considerably less fun for the player because they wanted to do a character concept that sounded cool, but the game punished them mechanically for doing so. With this uneven playing field, it can become very unfun for certain players. Tasha's makes it level so the orc can move that -2 around anywhere and move their pluses anywhere, and same for any race. It makes it that any idea has equal viability and that the dominant variable is player creativity and not what matches well with what Ability Score-wise.
