Nation States are an antiquated concept that shouldn't exist any longer.
basically what I'm saying is Lord of the Rings as a literature only aspect is weird today because this was a time when people didn't have tvs or phones or anything that showed them images of other places, so literature benefited from descriptions that seem over the top today, but back then did a good job of setting a picture in the person's head
I disagree here. Not only was the Lord of the Rings considered very description heavy even when it was released, but especially fantasy literature still benefits from detailed description because setting a picture in a person's head is still a concept and arguably one of the benefits books have over visual media.
Tolkien's work is also interesting because he lived during a time of deep racial oppression, and actively opposed it, yet his books are full of stereotypes about fictional races that persist to this day (eg. Elves always being slender, fair, and good at archery; dwarves having long beards and drinking heavily; orcs being the "evil race"; etc.). In the last few years many of these stereotypes/tropes have been challenged or rewritten, but it's still awkward to play a game of DnD with friends and have racial stereotypes all around without any consideration for how it would be if we applied these same stereotypes to real world groups.
A lot of this comes because Tolkien was a huge fan of Norse Mythology from his childhood on and found his main inspiration in it, the light elves, dwarves and orcs/trolls are pretty much lifted verbatim from those myths, as is the concept that evil comes from the east and north.
Several Dwarves, and Gandalf have their names lifted from the Edda, as is the relationship between the Elves and the Valar. Some more obscure things also appear in Tolkien's extended mythology (the Iron Wood is named as a troll-infested forest to the far east of both Midgard and Middle Earth) Finally even Middle Earth is just a translation of Midgard.
So the unfortunate elements in MIddle Earth come from the unfortunate elements in Norse and old Germanic mythology and during the last years of his life Tolkien even tried to rewrite his mythology to remove a lot of those stereotypes (he started to envision the Elves as gender-equal, tried to find an answer to whether Orcs are irredeemable etc) sadly he didn't have time to finish that work.
A lot of modern fantasy just copied the most popular tropes from Tolkien's work, often neither knowing nor caring where it originated from. Also with the stereotyping of the fantasy "races" themselves. In Tolkien's work there's, for example, Elves who live in the forest and use bows, but also Elves who mine metals and build huge cities and defend them with things such as catapults. But because Legolas was the most prominent Elf in the Lord of the Rings, and Lothlorien was a very memorable woodland realm the "Forest Elf" archetype was copied into much of other fantasy works.