I have to ask, what are people talking about when they say "min-maxing"? Because I get the impression we're talking about different things.
Thank you for pointing this out. It really feels like what a lotof the anti-minmaxers are saying is that they consider "being conscious of character stats and building a character with the desire to make them good at the thing they're meant to be good at." Sure, a 14-15 in a primary stat won't make a character unpalayble, but it will be a challenge. One that not every player is going to want to del with for every character. Sometimes that's not the story they want for their character. To bring up the racial ASI issue since I feel like that's an important aspect of this discussion, what if the story you want to tell about an orc wizard isn't about how difficult learning magic was for them? What if you'd rather their difficulty be in being a perfectly fine wizard but clashing with their family over being talented in intelectual pursuits rather than physical ones? Or hell, moving away from the popular orc wizard example, what about a dwarf wizard? Why should they be restricted to stories about their difficulties in magic? Or a dwarven bard who wants to record and share the songs and tales of glory of her people? What's so terrible and min-maxy about wanting them to be as good at the stuff their class does as an elven wizard is at the stuff their class would do?
Choosing, within the limits of the plausible and with secondary priorities in mind should they exist, ability scores that fit a character's primary competence, is just playing the game with a measure of competence. Not min-maxing.
The racial ASIs are a different matter though. These games work from the principle that being an outlier is more expensive than being average. And the racial ASIs tell us something about the world, namely that the baseline average of a race is different, so a high INT half-orc is more of an outlier than a high-INT human and thus more expensive. The problematic part, from my point of view, is that there seems to be - I don't know this part of the rules, actually - a limit to the level above the average you can buy, regardless of how many points you spend. So that it is actually impossible to make a high-INT half-orc rather than expensive. That I consider undesirable, but "more expensive" is OK. It just reflects that you're more of an outlier. So I'd just remove that attribute limit for everyone. If you want to set everything to 8 and buy INT 18, fine.
Beyond that, unless you want to overhaul the system and remove any extra cost for being an outlier for *everyone*, you can't keep a race's average different from any other's without it also being more expensive to be a non-typically competent member of that race. So what do you want? Do you want to compromise the integrity of your races in terms of worldbuilding in order to make it easier to be a non-typically competent member of a race, or do you want to keep your races intact in terms of worldbuilding but also keep it more expensive to be a good half-orc wizard than a good human wizard. You can't have both. I will almost always prioritize worldbuilding. Unless you really want all races to have the same average ability scores - and why the heck would you ever want that? - you shouldn't remove racial ASIs in character creation.
I think the thing that gets in my craw mechanically is that as you point out, a non-standard wizard will always be behind from the start of a campaign to pretty much the end, which few campaigns reach anyway. They'll always be behind any party members that do play into a more typical race-class combo. But another thing, I also brought up the example of a dwarven wizard, and I did that for a specific reason - why is that concept such an outlier? Or a dwarven bard? Or an orcish bard? Why is a tiefling fighter an outlier at all? Or a tiefling wizard? Or a tiefling barbarian for that matter? Tieflings can be born into any culture or family, why wouldn't you get a barbarian tiefling that's really good at Barbarian stuff? A halfling cleric? Why can't halflings be just as devout and mystically powerful as any other race? What about a gnomish rogue? What makes them an outlier? When you actually stop and break it down, the 'outlier' combinations become more prevalent than the 'typical' ones, or very near to it.
