Why is it whenever I try to find any info out about this game I find posts full of edgy "haha I killed that, are U mad?" assholes and borderline "race realists"?
Ffs I just wanted to find a post that would help me avoid killing Kobolds and the one posts I find asking the question is full of edgelords bragging about how they love to kill "vermin" races and gays.
This is what you get when you make a fantasy world were certain races are born evil, it attracts all the racist freaks that want to live out their genocide fantasies.
It's killing my fun for this game.
Authors have explored the idea but it's not really a feature of D&D unfortunately, especially with the mechanics reinforcing it constantly. There's just the occasional Good member of an Evil species rather than species not being inherently good or evil.
I'm glad Paizo killed that sacred cow, I just wish it hadn't taken until the remaster.
It was always really inconsistent. Some authors treated Alignment as "just kinda your vibe", some as "a combination of cultural factors and divine meddling", and some as "intrinsic cosmic morals", some both but for different things (humans vs Outsiders, etc). Negative Energy and undead as being an Eeeeevil Spookyforce or Basically Just Radiation.
That kind of unaddressed inconsistency fuelled, and still fuels, endless repeats of the "Is Necromancy evil? What if my skeletons are used as agricultural robots to allow for a higher standard of living?", where everyone talks past each other based on what part of the texts they read and settings they play in.
Yeah I blame WOTC for keeping the alignment system around through third ed. Even in the 2000s when I learned the game most people thought of alignment as more of an annoyance than something worthwhile.
I get why they kept it in 3rd with them wanting to keep and expand on the lore in order to keep and expand on TSR's player base, but they scrapped nearly everything for 4th ed and still kept it around for no good reason. You're right though, even in 3rd it mainly existed in order to trick paladins into falling.