I'm not a big fan of this strong current of powergaming culture that that the 5e community has developed, it's mirrors exactly what happened with 3.5 and Pathfinder and it sucked a whole lot of fun out of those systems (Pathfinder is such a great system for customisation and being able to express your character in mechanics, but what's the point of all that when the spirit of the community expects you build a machine as if there was prize money at stake at the end of the game?). If this was a tabletop game I'd be put off if my fellow players insisted they couldn't play a certain race or class combination because they'd have to start at 14 or 15 instead of 16 or 17.
Then again, this isn't a tabletop game. I'd have nothing against them adding options to change this for people who want to play that way. But I don't want it for the default setting.
This is my feeling also, almost exactly.
I would only caveat to say that it's only one slice of the 5e community that has calcified in this way, and it mainly comes from people who play or have played adventure league, or, unfortunately, those who are regularly DMed by people who play AL and pick up the mentality.
I was so excited to build an alchemist in the pathfinder system, and having that huge big plethora of options that I couldn't even begin to understand the breadth of... yes, I quickly discovered that I'd more or less have to ignore all of it if I wanted to have an even remotely optimal character, but I didn't really care about that, and just wanted to have fun with it. Everyone else at the table except for one other player who was starting PF for the first time alongside me, all had carefully constructed, min-maxed, power-gamed builds, and when asked to talk about their characters would only really talk about the build, and the skills, and what it could do... and that is honestly the absolute DEATH of the game, in spirit, if not in revenue.
(That said, I went on to enjoy my little alchemist so much that I created (in my own free time) a complex, detailed and excellently balanced 5e Alchemist class, complete with six subclasses which I'd highly recommend to folks interested in such things ^.^ It's far more fun and flexible than the Artificer which was, unfortunately, 80-90% finalised for release at the time I was working on this...)