they steal things, that’s their entire identity.
Maybe in memes. In actual lore their identity is diversity. Their country is kind of like India in that it is a loose collection of lots of different cultures which have been unified by outside influence. In this case it’s exactly 16 because this setting has dumb numerology stuff going on so numbers are important. (Elsweyr was made of 16 tribes, which became 16 kingdoms, in which live 16 different subspecies of Khajiit with a ‘special’ 17th one as their religious leader)
Theft is culturally important to them no more than it is culturally important to us, in the real world. In the same way that we have stories glorifying thieves and theft (whether they’re “morally good” thieves like Robin Hood or just interesting / funny / cool thieves like, idk, Conan the Barbarian) they also have that.
It just seems like you’re completely ignorant of basically everything written about the Khajiit, the most unique and interesting race in the setting.