I don't think making your cannon fodder enemies human criminals instead of goblins actually really reduces the shitty dehumanization problem and the fact that the argument's assumptions are something like "well obviously it's less racist because all our generic faceless bandits are white dudes who speak in Cockney" is like, I think... I mean it is An argument but it's sort of indicative
like the actual solution to this is to sit down and consider seriously what the parameters of the game you want to run are. like even using goblins isn't necessarily Auto Bad, "goblin" can mean damn near anything, you can portray them all as frigging Mogwai and- okay I haven't seen that movie in years there might be something bad about it but you get my point, right? they can be weird malicious eldritch shit that aren't actually People with a Society. also consider: you probably aren't running your low level encounters as being very intelligent so why do they have to be sapient?
if your game is just some popcorn combat stuff then... I really think it's some, yeah people criticize unthinking popcorn on the aggregate but that doesn't make it about *you* if you're making an informed choice
but specifically arguing for bandits over goblins because murdering humans is less racist is something you might wanna unpack