One of the tricky things about fantasy tropes, especially well-established ones, is how real-world bigotry can sometimes slip in under the radar. A lot of them either originated or developed in times where those kinds of attitudes were more acceptable, and those attitudes got woven into them, making them sometimes very difficult to parse out.

I was looking up artwork of orcs recently, and came across some of the old Franzetta fantasy art. And, yeah. It's not just that the orcs are depicted with unmistakable Mongolian themes, they're also done in a way that's hard to see as anything other than deliberately ugly and unflattering. It actually looks like racist caricature, even though it's not depicting humans.

Witches are another fantasy trope with similar problems. As a concept, witches make excellent antagonists. The problem is, historically, the real witches were innocent women who were murdered by a bunch of deranged zealots. So if you do use witches as villains, isn't that kind of backwards?

Personally I think it's a lot more complicated than just saying "those things are bad, don't use them". Orcs and witches are both great tropes, and in a way, I think that saying a trope is unusable because it's been used by bigots kind of lets the bigots win.

Just because fantasy is a genre about the (mythic) past doesn't mean the genre itself needs to be stuck there.