I think part of the "why are we bothering with wizard sub-classes at this point" come from the fact that wizards, unlike some of the other classes, are scraping the bottom of the barrel with this, at least IMO.
Clerics? Clerics there were clear areas where they needed some more subclasses, Forge being a big one that a lot of people were happy to see.
Or, alternatively, they introduced some new mechanics that had interesting potential, like the Warden Ranger's transformation ability.
With these wizards we have Thuerge, which has historical weight but mechanically is boring. Also, the idea of mixing divine and arcane is potentially less appealing, because clerics are no longer the only healer and they have pretty good offensive spells this time around, so there is little that the Arcane magic adds to the cleric.
Then we have the War Wizard, which is also a bit mechanically boring, and conceptually is a bit odd because "wizard trained for combat" looks very similar to "wizard who is an adventurer" to begin with. They don't really get the ability to do something new that other wizards can't, they just end up doing things better in certain respects. Every other PHB or SCAG wizard gets cool new things they can do with magic, not just things they could do anyway but better.
Then we had the Lore Wizard which seemed to be pretty roundly criticized as too much power and conceptually odd as it seemed to mash what we would expect from a war wizard with the idea of the generalist savant whose good at everything.
I think since the wizard UA material has been so poor of quality, and other than "generalist savant" there really isn't a major missing archetype from the wizard, a lot of people would just have rather seen other quality material.