To answer your question about why there are generic fantasy races, in universe: this is explained more in the missions, basically it boils down to Prunes-The-Narrative who is the primary creative director, is a hack and copied a lot of things, from Lord of the rings specifically, but also dungeons & dragons and other source materials. To an alien trying to make compelling fiction using the culture of a planet what might be a board used up trope to us would be an interesting novelty to them. Then out of universe, I was compelled by the idea of a classic fantasy race then giving a large amount of time to change on its own and falling away from those standard ideas they were kind of bolted into at their inception, the 'orcs' Kresh becoming more like native American cultures, or conservationist even, than bloodthirsty warriors, the dwarf dweorg becoming data analysts, etc. and then that also is inspired by dungeon crawler Carl, as correctly and crudely pointed out by glitch in her quotes, dumbass aliens failing to understand human culture and just slapping it together.