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Notes -
I think the strange thing to me is the weird double think involved. 5.5e turned humanoids into homework monsters by making the DM have to manually apply racial traits to the NPC statblocks, and reclassified a few humanoids as other creature types, but it still has bioessentialist "evil" races all the same. Even if the front of the Monster Manual clarifies that alignment can be changed by the DM, it is really hard to imagine, say, Mind Flayers ever having a good relationship to humanoids, given their diet.
And 5.5e still has monsters that are practically only ever going to be used in a "horde of unambiguous evil" way, like undead and fiends. Like, sure, it might be fun to have an antihero vampire or a risen fiend under certain circumstances, but most DMs are not going to put much thought into it, and just start breaking out the undead or fiendish hordes.
What's weird about it? It is as you said: Mind Flayers are an acceptable "evil" race because they are literally an obligate predator of humanoids. Traits that aren't present in real humans are an acceptable factor to base "evilness" upon. Aside from small clusters of the kind of people who hate Frieren for writing demons as evil anyway.
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