It leaves us with Larian back-handedly telling us that it's okay, and even encouraged, to murder children of one particular ethnic/racial group, but not another. Make no mistake: the goblins presented are a fully sapient, culturally structured people, and their children are as well. Larian did not have to present them that way, and they did not have to put goblin children in the space, and they did not have to put them in combat situations and offer incentives to kill them... that was all their personal design choice, alongside their other personal design choice of rendering the same action impossible against children of a different ethnic/racial group in the same chapter.
And this encapsulates the problems of abandoning alignment. You can no longer tell stories where it is okay to kill hordes of evil monsters. When evil humanoids no longer exist they become an "ethnic/racial group"
I know for some this was always the case and removing alignment simply removes the fig leaf that hid the problem of racist tropes in the fantasy genre but I think the people who say that:
1) fail to distinguish fantasy from reality
2) are blind to the many objectionable actions in the game. And if you talk to such people long enough they eventually reveal they have no problem solving problems by way of murder
DnD is making a big mistake - I agree with EA Wyll. Killing every goblin is good thing because they evil raiders who kill just destroy another village if we let them go free.
