Nilo-Saharan is actually where the issue of an accepted family arises. Eastern Sudanic has much more going for it in terms of legitimate relations between its languages and its sub-groups such as Nubian, Nilotic and Saharan which are most likely valid families. On the topic of Nilo-Saharan, more work needs to be done to really understand if it serves much purpose in grouping a vast array of different African languages. There exists lots of patterns and connections between the various Nilo-Saharan languages however when you have so many languages in your proposed family, you end up needing more proof and more evidence to put forward that family as valid and Nilo-Saharan very clearly isn't a small grouping of languages at all which is a big component of the extreme skepticism towards its validity. I don't know nearly enough to be able to tell you if nilo-saharan is valid or not or if there is a possibility there is absolute validity that it exists but just needs to be proven but this goes on a tangent from the discussion of Meroitic and if we were to discard Nilo-Saharan as a family entirely, this contributes nothing to an Afro-Asiatic connection and I'll discuss that in the following paragraph.
Glottolog gives an interesting assessment of the Nilo-Saharan family and makes a critical re-structure and breakdown of the family that is supported by more compelling evidence. They break down Nilo-Saharan into about 27 families of different levels. Central Sudanic, Nilotic and Nubian being the largest. https://glottolog.org/
Glottolog aims to be very skeptical of Language families and only officially accept a family based on an abundance of evidence proportionate and sufficient to the connections within the given family being proposed. Therefore Nilo-Saharan falls short in this regard.
So even if we were to assume 100% that no further work or investigation into Nilo-Saharan is required to prove a valid family, this does nothing to separate Meroitic from the languages it has already been proven to be distantly connected to and does not support your retreat to an Afro-Asiatic classification. Ironically Afro-Asiatic in itself has seen slight recent criticisms for the methods used to connect its various languages but this is its own discussion unrelated to this.
-Essentially, the argument you make against Nilo-Saharan doesn't tackle how the Nubian language family consists of languages descended from Proto-Nubian that are essentially believed to have been an Offshoot of Meroitic following the Noba assimilation and influence prior to and after the fall of Kush. It also doesn't tackle Claude Rilly's detailed analysis in tracing the ancestral languages of Modern Nubian and an along the way finding several connections between Non-Nubian languages to Meroitic giving a hypothetical family being proposed by Rilly known as Proto-North-Eastern-Sudanic. I won't waffle too much but ultimately, the invalidity of the Nilo-Saharan family (which is still a matter of dispute and yet to be undeniably proven) does not miraculously also invalidate already present and consistently proven relations that Ancestral Nubian languages as well as Meroitic have with other neighboring Nilo-Saharan languages. Claude Rilly has made a good case in demonstrating the dispersal of Nubian languages and their history in Sudan and he serves as a good point of reference regarding Meroitic which he has placed to be a part of a hypothesized family of Proto-NES (North eastern Sudanic).
As for the Afro-Asiatic evidence. A lot of these evidences are brought on through lexicon parallels between Meroitic and Afro-Asiatic languages (most specifically Ancient Egyptian and Berber). As well as consonantal compatibility restriction which appears to indicate a positive link to Afro-Asiatic. The problem in specific with these two shreds of evidence (These aren't the only ones but just the main pieces of evidence I can seem to recall from the papers I've read through), Meroitic has several loan words from the Ancient Egyptian language and historians make very clear it is no surprise that these lexical parallels with Meroitic and ancient Egyptian are most likely and unsurprisingly just loan words from outside influence. I think there are some papers out there that discuss the existence of these loan words I'll try to link some later. Also is what appears to be the positive lexical comparison between Nubian and Berber but the paper I link below tests the existence of this link and forms a fairly justified conclusion given the circumstances of these identified parallels. https://www.academia.edu/45076146/O...and_Maarten_Kossmann_unpublished_around_2000_
Consonantal compatibility restriction has been used to venture for an Afro-Asiatic relation and turned out positive in fact for Meroitic, however, the problem lies in the unreliability of this specific attribute as a test for a lingual connection and going off what I've read in other spaces, this mainly would prove as unreliable due to the fact that very clear-cut and understood Non-Afro-Asiatic languages can be grouped into the family simply based on this method of testing or that Afro-Asiatic languages can be excluded and drawn out from the family for the same reason. What's more, is how Ancient Egyptian bears this same Consonantal compatibility restriction so if we were to disregard the former counter-evidence entirely, we still have no proof that this positive link to Afro-Asiatic isn't because of Ancient Egyptian influence. I want to make clear these are not the only arguments for Afro-Asiatic and obviously many more reasonings for Afro-Asiatic exist, however, these appear to be some of the most commonly referenced arguments and I wanted to move them out of the way first and foremost.
I wouldn't lie too hard on the Genetic evidence, we know that Nubia specifically was essentially the corridor for Eurasian admixture being introduced into Sub-Saharan Africa for thousands of years dating from the formation of the Proto-Cushitic speakers all the way to the Medieval Arab expansion. The existence of Eurasian admixture, in this case, does not help to draw/suggest a connection to Afro-Asiatic speakers the same way Eurasian Admixture in Great Lakes Africa would. Conflating Eurasian admixture as well as close Genetic distances to Cushitic speakers among Nubians, to an absolute or at least somewhat reliable marker of linguistic similarity is inept of any further understanding of the background of Ancient Nubia and Sudan as a whole.
As time passes discussions continue to happen. Nothing much has progressed since the initial propositions back in the early 2000s. We won't go anywhere far from here because to everyone else this is a matter of opinion and trusting what you think is worthy evidence. We can never be truly sure of any classification not until further work is done to bring forward much more conclusive evidence and maybe provide more insight into previous evidence. Inshallah that work is done and we can grow to learn more and more about the Meroitic language.
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