High Elves didn’t work because they wrote them almost completly out by Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, and by WoW: TBC doubled down on their trope-busting by writing the Blood Elves (Blizzard’s high elves) into the faction of Orcs and Trolls instead of the traditional high fantasy stereotypical pairing of high elves, humans, and dwarves.
Not only did they consider it more interesting to write and design, but it solved a problem they had game design-wise if one faction having no conventionally pretty race, for players to whom that is a dealbreaking factor.
Blizzard was very passionate about High Elves and the Blood Elves that followed them. What they weren’t passionate about was continuing to tie their main story to humans and the Alliance.
The original I made in 2018 didn’t survive the back and forth lockdowns that effectively shuttered the main High Elf threads of that time. It’s been reposted once or twice since then, but other than that, it lives somewhere on my hard drive.