I'd stipulate without objection that Trek has long suffered from an over-reliance on monolithic cultures, and wholeheartedly agree with you that later shows may have gone too far at times in treating the bowl cut as obligatory—albeit with some refreshing exceptions peppered in, such as the eminently logical choice of simply letting Tuvok have Russ' natural hair.
However, just for the record (and the sake of trivia), the notion of 'the Spock' being a haircut common (if not universal) among his father's people actually dates back to TOS, rather than being wholly a bolt-on of subsequent productions. Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry's The Making Of Star Trek (1968, pg. 224) specifically noted of Spock in its chapter concerning his character: "His hair style is in the Vulcan mode."
Of course, this was a production team that half-jokingly suggested "all proper names for denizens of Mr. Spock’s 'PLANET VULCAN' follow a set routine. To wit: all names begin with the letters 'SP' and end with the letter 'K.' All names to have a total of five letters in them—no more and no less." Worse, the very first contender offered up for a potential second Vulcan character name under this scheme was (and I kid you not, even if Justman may have been): "Spook"! So yes, "racially limited view of a fictional race" is certainly apt, on multiple levels.
Even if Vulcan names still ended up becoming somewhat overly homogenized anyway, thank the Great Bird (or rather Ted Sturgeon in this case) that adherence to so ludicrously narrow a mindset wasn't actually attempted! Had it been, I wonder what would have happened down the line, when they ran out of names that met those stringent criteria? The first Vulcan character to break the pattern out of necessity would no doubt be decried a violation of Canon and Gene's Vision™!
(In a related coppery vein, while searching to see if I could find any quotes from Russ or other VGR personnel regarding Tuvok's hair, I accidentally unearthed this little coprolith of a thread. Yikes. Someone's idea of an early April Fool's joke? Poe's Law in action? In any case, it certainly lived up to the descriptor in its title. Ridiculous indeed...)
Please forgive my own racially-limited perspective here, but isn't that rather part of the point with respect to Burnham's character, though? As you yourself seem to have recognized, from certain angles or at a distance, her chosen style conceals her human features and lends her the superficial appearance of being Vulcan:
For me, the way it was done instantly created a striking impression that Burnham at that time in her life had been 'trying too hard' (and in vain) to 'pass' and be accepted on Vulcan. Both her assumed demeanor and 'dressed for success' fashion choices seemed to me directly reflective of that. We know she was indeed groomed in this by Sarek—no pun intended, and no doubt to Amanda's criticism and attempted mitigation, per "Point Of Light" (DSC)—yet it would also be in concert with Michael's own underlying motivations to be a willing participant in the erasure of her humanity, having lost her birth family under traumatic circumstances and struggled to cope with the emotional injury of that, and her own sense of blame for it. Both internally and externally, Burnham felt pressured to 'fit in' and conform herself to Vulcan society's explicitly unfair and racist standards, much as black women in white-dominated societies do today.
To my eye, the implication here seems one more deliberately symbolic of the character's background, and perhaps even an element of intentional allegory, than it does the careless accident of an insensitivity to real-life racial analogues on the part of the production team. After all, they seem sensitive enough that they aren't choosing to maintain the former practice of having white actors don yellowface to play Vulcans, or blackface to play Klingons. And this aspect of Burnham's characterization received acknowledgment not only in the costuming, but in the text itself...
"The Vulcan Hello" (DSC):
BURNHAM: Maybe I can try to learn Vulcan, to be quicker with my answers.
SAREK: Your human tongue is not the problem. It is your human heart.
SAREK: Your human tongue is not the problem. It is your human heart.
"Battle At The Binary Stars" (DSC):
GEORGIOU: What an ego I had, thinking I could pick away the shell the Vulcans put around you. I was so sure I could do it.
Per "Lethe" (DSC), at the point Burnham came aboard the Shenzhou, she was facing something of an existential crisis, believing she had been outright "rejected from the Expeditionary Group for being too human" and that her "failure" to live up to Sarek's efforts (and by extension, her own) to carefully cultivate her into "a being of exquisite logic to rival the best of [his] species" had made her "his greatest disappointment" (and thus also one to herself).
Having in a sense now lost her Vulcan family as well, and with the adopted self-image of Vulcan identity to which she had clung for so long in danger of cracking, Burnham was offered a new character template and family unit by Georgiou (much as Janeway offered Seven of Nine), and accepted. Having spent years Vulcan-ing, and proving unsuccessful in her own eyes, she shifted her ambitions toward Starfleet-ing instead, only for this pursuit in turn to come under threat, forcing her to reevaluate and reconstruct herself yet again. Her physical progression of hairstyles reflects outwardly the inner search for her 'true self' and the gradual stripping away of her constructed artifices.
Could they have found a way to accomplish this utilizing only Martin-Green and Arhin's own natural hair? I'd certainly assume so. But would it have had the same impact and illustrative effect on a visual level as what we got, especially given the extant context of the choices made by previous productions? Perhaps not.
-MMoM
[P.S. -- My apologies again for the white-man-splaining, if this comes off that way. Your points are well taken, of course. Obviously, I can't dictate to you or anyone else how you ought to feel about it, and wouldn't presume to. I can only say how I interpreted it.]
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