You can think of it as an invasion novel rather than SF, which is the genre landscape within which it is written. Maybe someone should have a go at The Battle of Dorking instead. At least nobody much would complain about faithfulness to the original since nobody's read it for a century and a bit.
Not sure I agree with that. Yes, there was the invasion fear context too but WotW was one of what Wells called his ‘scientific romances’ and the Martians based on his essay ‘Man In The Year Million’ attempting to take a scientific view of the long term evolution of humans, physically and morally
Why waste money on Martians when you can have the French instead?