It weirds me out that halflings and gnomes are stronger than humans in featless games.
But in an AL context this move makes sense for WotC. I can view this as an AL-specific workaround for AL's mandatory point buy, which artificially narrowed the range of viable class/race combos, and this is opening it back up again. In an AL context it doesn't matter if halflings are stronger than humans because there's no AL-relevant difference between Str 17 and Str 16.
If you're rolling stats anyway though, this is a solution in search of a problem. You could already play that half-orc wizard with no loss of effectiveness, as soon as you rolled a 16+ for your stats, which is more than 50% of the time.