Is Hex worth it at high levels?

[diplomancer]

The entirety of my position is the books aren't clear on what is needed for the spell recast actions (and yes that is what I am calling them).

And here is already where your troubles begin. You give a name that is simply nowhere in the rules, and not only don't stop at the arbitrary nowhere-to-be-found in the rules naming, but start drawing a lot of inferences from this naming, and these inferences are all completely arbitrary "yes, you need components, but not slots, nor the Cast a Spell Action, and you also don't need all components, only V and S, and no, you don't need V and S if you are a wildshaped Druid. And a 2nd level wildshaped Druid can provide those components for recasting the spell, but he has to wait 16 (!) levels to provide the exact same components when casting the spell, it's just that much harder. Because reasons."

Thus a ruling was needed for the weird cases where trying to use them subtle mattered (because to do something subtly you first need to know what the something looks like).
The ruling was the recast options should require something similar to the V,S components of the original spell cast if they had them.
In the case of shapeshifted Druids, they can preform some animal version of those components.

As far as rulings go that is pretty simple. Nothing is claimed as additional RAW (though going strictly by RAW is stupid anyways), just a ruling to clear up a lack of RAW.

"You need V and S components, but not M, unless you are a wild-shaped Druid" is very much additional rules.

Not to mention that there are a lot of ways of becoming creatures incapable of speech which are not just a wild-shaped Druid, and you have to come up with a different rule for all of them, preferably explaining, from the rules as written, why Wild-shaped Druids can do it but those other forms cannot (if your ruling is that they indeed cannot).

And worse of all... you haven't even solved the problem you wanted to solve in the first place! You just made this power of using those spells without anyone noticing you're doing anything out of the ordinary a Druid-exclusive... not even a Sorcerer with Subtle Spell could do it, because you can only apply Subtle Spell when you actually cast the spell, and because it's explicitly about spell components, not about quasi-spell quasi-components.

As an aside, and this is strictly my personal opinion: it strikes me as wrong-headed to identify what you consider to be problematical interactions in the rules and, instead of having a frank conversation with your players about why you'd prefer if they did not use this particular interaction, you believe that the best way to deal with these interactions is coming up with convoluted rulings about why the interactions don't work. You go on that path, and a lot of problems start appearing, as this thread shows.

As to how to deal with subtle Hex, assuming it bothers you for some reason? It's trivial. If the problem is the squirrel loophole, ask your players not to use it. If the problem is disrupting social situations, let the players enjoy their small successes on not that important social situations... until they try it on someone really important, that would naturally have counterplays available, like someone constantly checking the king whether he's under some new sort of spell... and then have all the PCs arrested until they confess that they Hex'ed the king...