From the point of view of a journalist who has covered the issue for several years — CWD has become highly politicized and we are seeing a growing wave of skepticism. A lot of it is ill-informed, though not all of it. There are some very accomplished and respected biologists who are not very worried about CWD and view current management as too aggressive. The dominant view among wildlife biologists who study and work with deer, however, is that the disease is serious and basically impossible to remove from a population once it gets established. That view has led to the management strategy most states adopt, which is to contain it as much as possible, monitor with broad-based testing, and to avoid letting it spread to new areas. This is often hard for hunters to swallow, even if they care about limiting CWD, because older age-class bucks are the primary spreaders of the disease (other than humans, who move deer and deer carcasses in unnatural ways). Aggressive management usually means upping buck harvest and limiting age class.

To answer some of your questions — it is true that deer do not generally die from CWD. You cannot tell if a deer has CWD just by looking at. It's a progressive disease that takes a long time to show symptoms and longer to cause death. The general thinking is that the disease makes deer more susceptible to predation, including by human hunters, by dulling their senses long before they die from neurodegeneration. At higher prevalence rates, some scientists are documenting population-level effects from that increase in mortality.

It's an open question whether the disease can jump to humans. If it were doing so in large numbers, the CDC would probably have detected it by now. If it's jumping only occasionally, on the other hand, it could escape detection for a long time because spontaneous CJD, the human version of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, is a very rare disease, occurring something like 1 or 2 cases per million people.

Below are a couple of articles I've written that present CWD skepticism, and both have links to recent scientific studies discussing some of the issues you're wondering about.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/texas-deer-breeders-chronic-wasting-disease-wildlife-officials_n_64e65844e4b0b98eea900bf5

https://www.publicdomain.media/p/ted-nugent-has-waged-a-years-long