The only problem with this mentality though is that world building isn’t done through the other players you bump into in the world (outside of strict RP). Perhaps this was the case back during vanilla when 90% of people realistically had poor equipment and gear with the exception of people who were adventuring to dangerous places for either high-end raiding or PVP, but this isn’t the case anymore in the modern era. Pretty much as soon as one could start soloing high-end vanilla WoW content (and especially after transmog), expecting other players and their appearances to reflect how the game’s world is would be folly. In Wotlk, you could start soloing Vanilla content and get great looking gear that made you look like some legendary warrior. When transmog came along, you could be the most casual of casual players (doing basically no raids or PVP) and look like you were Azeroth’s greatest champion. But, of course, when everyone in Stormwind and Orgrimmar start doing this, it suspends your disbelief. The same occurs when you see anything in the gameplay that doesn’t match the lore of WoW (for instance, being in a raid where over half your members are Belves).
As I mentioned earlier, I think people generally speaking tend to regulate themselves well on these things. If we’re operating on lore, orcs probably shouldn’t be mages (it’s established that ogres were very secretive with their magics and the only two orc mages we meet both had to learn from the forsaken as presumably special cases), but it’s not necessary to prevent people from making them because very few have in the 12 years since Cata came out. I think people tend to get inspired to do race/class combos depending on what is shown and represented frequently in the lore. Since orc mages aren’t represented a lot, this has led to very few players taking up this combination. Under your mentality, the player base is too ignorant to understand that certain race/class combos don’t make sense and therefore need to be roadblocked from making certain combos (the decision is taken from them). But I personally have faith in the players when it comes to this stuff (with the exception of the large influx of Tauren rogues we’ll be seeing in DF, which is mostly just because of the meme) and I don’t think many people will play the sorts of race/class combos you’re dreading seeing because, like you, they tend to have a sense of what makes sense. All you’re doing by restricting certain combinations is stifling the creativity of a few people who had really good niche ideas and wanted to fulfill them.
So, going to one of your previous examples–who cares if an Ironforge dwarf is wearing the Dark Iron heritage set? Perhaps their head-canon is that they’re half Dark Iron or they’re an Ironforge who sympathizes with the Dark Irons or perhaps they just think the set is cool. It’s not like my perception of the game, its world, and its lore is dependent on (either entirely or even partially) their character. That ended a long time ago when you had people using transmog to look like Superman. Next thing you’ll tell me that we need to limit Belves to one per server to maintain the canon racial composition of the Horde within the playerbase.
A “half-measure” according to you. It’s also a half-measure that they took in Shadowlands, so I don’t understand the respect. Regardless, if you truly think that every possible identity needs an entire AR made for it, I’d argue that your standards are a bit too high (a double measure, if you will). Whether you like to admit it or not, a lot of identities in WoW essentially boil down to different flavors of core races and don’t need to be given an entire race in order to be represented. Before their AR variants, the Mag’har and Dark Irons were always just regular Orcs and Dwarves with some NPC only skin options available. Because Blizz decided to make them into AR’s and go in a completely different art direction with them, I’ll never be able to make a faithful recreation of the Nagrand orcs nor the Blackrock Depths dwarves. It’s unfortunate, but I guess the damage has already been done. I’ll just have to cross my fingers and hope none of my other favorite alt identites end up getting the AR treatment. The Wildhammers were lucky, if you ask me (although they could stand to get a few more hairstyles).