The advantage of wildcard certificates is that you don't have to expose each single subdomain over internet. Which is great if you want to have https on local only subdomains.
If you still use HTTP for cert verification on ACME, you are doing it wrong. Use DNS-01 only, there is no need to allow any inbound traffic to your servers. and HTTP will not give you wildcard anyway.
Yes, you are right, I already use DNS validation. But it is just it is easier to request a single wildcard certificate for my domain and have all the subdomains that I use for the local services defined only in my local DNS.
I cannot fully automate the certificate renewal because namecheap requires to allowlist the IP that can call its API, and my ip is dynamic. So renewing a single certificate saves me time.
Also, the wildcard certificate is installed on a single machine, so it is not the I increase a lot the attack surface by not having different certificates for each virtual host.