Navel Gazing on Goblins & Their Narrative Purpose

In my opinion goblins currently occupy a strange place in the fantasyland milieu. They've been increasingly treated as people-like. Goblin is a playable race in several D&D settings, Eberron and Ravnica come to mind as well as their core ancestry status in Pathfinder 2E. In these settings goblins are people with all the implications that brings. They have varied emotions and outlooks. Goblins can be smart, clean, dirty, angry, pacifistic, inventive, industrious, cruel, and any number of other things. Goblins have societies, friends, and children whom they love.

I feel like this is something of a misstep. Goblins which have been granted narrative personhood seem to me to be nothing more than slightly grotty gnomes, and often they're actually not even that grotty. They're small, they make things, they play tricks, but also they're dirty. It's like taking the strong stereotyped characteristics of the various dragons and throwing them all away. I understand (and enjoy) the depiction of slightly grotty gnomes as PCs in those settings, but I don't think it's the right fit for my fantasyland. 

My conclusion is that my goblins are wolves with opposable thumbs. Sure they sometimes have good humour, sometimes can be convinced and bartered with, but at the end of the day they're there to provide a low-level foe who nonetheless acts with near-human levels of wit and tactics.

But, you say, can't regular full-personhood humans fill this role just as well ? To which my answer is, yes you're right, but generally (and in my mind healthily) people balk at declaring a group of persons killable with impunity. That's exactly why I think it's a mistake to give a real proper personhood to the goblin. The way in which I deploy goblins, I don't want the PCs - or indeed the players - to worry about what to do with the goblin children, there are other species with full personhood to foist that dilemma upon the them if that's what we want.

I am acutely aware of the problem that exists in labelling near human intelligences as non-persons and giving narrative permission to kill them with impunity. So instead I say they occupy a category of thing more like an elemental, ghost, or vampire. All of these things are generally presented as being intelligent and person-like to lesser or greater extents but they all have something about them which makes them not-people. They're not made of flesh and blood, they aren't assumed to reproduce in a 'natural' fashion and they don't generally have a culture or a society in the way we imagine such things.

So I'm removing certain things from goblins so that they are as far away from being people as possible whilst still keeping their cunning. They don't have genders or sexes, they don't need to eat, they don't reproduce and have little goblin children, they don't have little goblins hopes and dreams, they barely have a long-term memory at all and they aren't made of flesh and blood, if you cut them you find dirt and sticks.