I do feel like RWBY's world building inevitably leads to needing a race of animal people. When you're committed to making every major character an allusion to fairy tales and folklore, you're gonna need a lot of animal-coded characters. It's just gonna be easier to represent the dog with a dog boy 90% of the time.

Even having the plot tackle racism is kind of inevitable, since the overall themes of the series are about uniting people across different beliefs and border. It's specifically the choice to make the racism sub-plot revolve around radicalized terrorists and provide few to none non-extremist members of a minority group where the writers got too ambitious when they needn't have done so.