honestly, if you care about balance, the differences between races should be your least problem.
With classes, items and illithid powers everyone can become godlike powerful. So even if we agree that dragonborn are the worst race, you can totally become a god as dragonborn and murder everything in your path.
DnD was never balanced to begin with and Larian made this worse with their choices of items, special powers and changes to DnD rules.
Yes, I know, however, the argument was that the human racials suck. The dragonborn ones arguably more.
I still have a bunch of dragonborn characters because I pick race based on looks, and I think they look badass. I never play humans, they're boring to me.
Both the dragonborn and human racials are supremely better than what tieflings get. Forest gnomes are also pretty mediocre compared to dragonborn and humans. Dragonborn's racial got fixed to scale with level and is a CON save spell, so any class of dragonborn can use it and it scales. Tiefling spells and High Elf/Drow racial spells are pretty damn worthless, and in the case of the tiefling and high elves, their spells are locked to CHA and INT respectively. At least high elves have other powerful racials, but tieflings do not.
It scales, but poorly. It's max 12 damage at lvl 6(my highest dragonborn), which isn't worth the action. She punches harder than that.
High elf cantrip I pick depending on what I'll use it for. I usually pick utility on something that'll have low into, like Light. Fire Bolt is taken if and only if I need to fight barrels on fire and I want something that can do it.
Not every racial has to be good for every class.
Except it does, because half orc racial is good for every class. Wood elf is good for every class. Githyanki is good for every single class.
So when you have races that have strong, universally applicable racials, and races that don't, guess which are the races that will end up strong?
You say Dragonborn doesn't scale great. It still scales, and is an aoe cantrip skill. Know what doesn't scale? Burning Hands (which uses CHA attack role, so useless for tieflings that are not sorc/warlock/paladin), Conjure Flame Blade (which not only doesn't scale, but is awful because it unequips your current weapons and as such removes gear bonuses), and even Mage Hand is pretty damn awful in its current implementation. The single time I have ever used Mage Hand to decent effect was during the Gortash fight to fling back the mines, that's it. Could probably use it for Orthon Yugir when he drops his suicide mines, but that's two encounters in the whole game.
The point being, the human and half elf civil militia racials are pretty good as far as "weak racials" go. Other races have it much worse, and seeing half elves and humans complain about extra carry capacity, free weapon proficiencies, shield, and light armor proficiency when other races get far less and others are busted OP like the half orc triple crit and cheat death racials is another level of detached from the reality of the game.
Damage starts at 2:20
That's a half orc paladin/sorc multiclass that one turned Raphael's 666 HP SOLO. Look at those crits. His numbers would be a third less without the half orc racial. He killed Raphael in 3 attacks. He gets the benefit of a magic rare amulet that cheats death once, FOR FREE as a race. Racials are not remotely balanced.
