For a lot of people, yes changelings are "snowflake" characters, mainly because of what people are trying to build with them (Sorry, but its true).
When you go back to 'Year of the Comet' (the 3e book that introduces SURGE, and Changelings) some things become very clear, that many people want to gloss over.
The first is, the total number of people who were affected, and just who was affected. Basically the break down works out to be less than 1% of the total population (for a measure, Awakened make up 5% of the population). With Human Sapien Sapiens (plain-jane humans) being the vast majority. Followed by the common meta races (orks, elves, trolls), followed by the awakened, followed by meta-variants. And this was compounded, meaning a awakened Troll would almost never Surge, much less a Oni (ork meta variant) adept.
The next bit of info that people gloss over was that for every Rebecca Constantine (the literal first "Cat Girl" in SR), where were 1000 people that died in agony as bone spurs erupted from their bodies, or their lungs stopped processing Air, or were stoned to death because they developed faceted eyes or a proboscis.... Because fear of Insect Spirits is a very real Thing.
In short, SURGE made freaks. But people don't want to play freaks as in "Wally, the Street Sam with a Tentacle hand" they want to play freaks as in "Miss Meow, the sexay cat girl with a million P2 fans!"
Or at least that is how the vast majority of characters are portrayed by their players when they come to the forums...
Now it doesn't help that 4e basically tried to make it SURGE into a cookie cutter "build your own race" maker and really pushed the transhumanist aspects instead of the dystopian features that SURGE originally entailed (as many of the positive qualities people pick now, didn't even exist before 4e).
5e tried to correct this in some ways, but its hidden behind a word salad of copy pasta and poorly phrased new sentences sprinkled in.
A lot of people see SURGE as a way to try to bring in races or concepts from other games into Shadowrun... without really thinking if that "race" would even fit into Shadowrun, and its society...(Hint. May do not...) and this is before the problems we already have with some of the meta variants in SR and players not reading or understanding what they are reading to begin with...
For examples:
Pixies with Guns.... (don't get me started... I done more the a few write ups, SOME WITH PICTURES! about why this idea needs to die in a fire...)
Naga Machine Gunners (Naga don't have arms... hard to hold and point a gun, much less pull a trigger...)
Sasquatch Faces. (Sasquatch don't have a voice box that can produce human words in any language, although they are incredibly proficient at sound <NOT WORD> imitation)
And that's before we even get into the concept of "Is it people, or is it animal" for many countries. (take the Pixie and Naga, in many countries they are considered animals, and thus fall under animal control laws.... and not meta-human rights!)
yet we will see people try to build these exact combinations of characters, then wonder why a large part of the community looks that then and says "No,"