He might have been too powerfull, but a lot of new stuff (and even current stuff) was at least as broken (see aforementioned summoning of 1500 points per turn in a 2000 point game....). And more importantly, they could've actually balanced him instead of nerfing him into the ground. GW has this weird thing where whenever a wizard in AoS is involved in something that even vaguely starts to resemble broken it gets nerfed into the ground, while it's fine to do more or less the exact same thing or even worse as long as it isn't done with a wizard. With the exception of Nagash & Morathi, for some reason those two are allowed their super powerfull magic shenanigans.