Yes absolutely 100% it could and IMO should be.
What's the thing folks complain about all the time with Sorcerer? It's a class with no features, and Metamagic simply doesn't fill the hole.
It's entirely because they got cold feet about the playtest Sorcerer.
Genuinely, why?
The definitional thing about Sorcerers is that they are an innate font of power from some kind of source. Each subclass would have transformed the character in different ways. A Shadow Sorcerer? Literally becoming a living shadow, skulking about, stabbing unseen and then slinking away. A Storm Sorcerer? Living storm cloud, surging around the battlefield. Clockwork? You literally become a mechanical man, with parts made in Japan Breland. Aberrant? Congratulations, the Cthulhu was inside you all along, and sometimes he likes to come out and play.
I genuinely think most people looked at the playtest Sorcerer and thought "wait, EVERY sorcerer has to play this way? HELL NO" when that's...literally not what was on offer. They were testing a "core" build--a baseline subclass--before branching out.
The issue (like with so many D&D classes) is that the sorcerer is three archetypes in a trench coat fighting to see which one is going to be the top. You have the Innate Caster, the wizard-without-a-spellbook character. You have the Spell Shaper, the character whose brimming with power and can manipulate it into different forms (controllably or not) and you have the Monster Scion, who lets you play a PC power level monster.
The current Sorcerer (circa 2024) tries to play to all three in diverse ways. You can play the Innate Caster by picking the more abstract sorceries (like storm or lunar). You have Innate Sorcery and Metamagic/Sorcery points and Wild Magic to foster Spell Shaper, and you can pick the more monstrous (draconic, aberrant, clockwork) to do the Monster Scion. All three are supported, though none exceptionally well.
The UAS was primarily the Monster Scion with a token nod to the Innate Caster. You started out looking like the wizard-without-a-spellbook, but you ended up a monster at the end of the day. You couldn't ignore either side well; you didn't start out with your claws and scales until you blew all your spells, and the more you used your magic, the more inhuman you became. So, if you wanted to stay primarily in inhuman form, you were incentivized to waste your spells early to get to your monster side. If you didn't want to interact with the monster, you were incentivized to not use your magic to stay in your human form. That creates only a single avenue of play where you have to be okay with measured use of magic (like any caster) and slowly drift towards inhuman.
If I want to play both a primary caster AND have draconic abilities, I don't want to weigh one against the other. I want my claws and scales on tap when I start the day, and I don't want to end up a monster because I cast magic missile too many times per day. I also don't want to start a mage and end up a sub-par fighter.
Note the concept of "Spell Shaper" was not even a factor in the UAS because the power budget for it was filled by having those sub-par fighter abilities tacked on when you are out of magic (and likely, your allies would be too, so they're looking for long rest, not waiting for you slap on plate and keep going).
While not perfect, I much prefer the current style sorcerer design which gives me the option to be a bookless wizard or a dragon-man depending on how I build. I would have hated to have my bookless wizard forced to become a dragon, shadow, or living storm by using my abilities. Likewise, I would have hated to try to play a dragon mage and have to blow most of spells before I gained access to my draconic abilities. I was the worst of both worlds.
