To me it's correcting a technicality. We consider apes and elephants and humans all different species, but make them bipedal and sentient and suddenly they're a race? Nah. Species is more correct, even if it did come out of wokeness. This changes is like the least controversial/woke change they made in 5/5.24 IMO.
EDIT: And for all those who are like "well species can't breed with each other." And to that I say, it's a fuckin magical fantasy land of pretend. Do what you want. That's the beauty of TTRPGs. The official rules only really matter during official sanctioned play stuff like Adventure league and whatnot. Just homebrew shit. When I made a game, I let it be dark/gritty/real, so all the woke shit got removed and replaced with things that made sense.
Y'know, I haven't seen any recent movie about Booker T. Washington. You figure his story would be right up their alley to make, but nope, totally forgotten. Last movie they did on him was an hour-long film back in '84 (it even had LeVar Burton! *soyface*).