I don't know where you came across these 'two paths of thought'. I've never seen 'the vegvísir' in any serious academic work on the Viking Age (or Medieval Scandinavia etc). It is a staple of internet viking-romanticists, neo-pagans and other people who simply don't have a clue and frankly just invent their own history. Like combining this symbol with Elder Futhark runes that have nothing to do with it and predate it by a millennium. And apparently they've recently become a staple of the Icelandic tourist trade to print on generic knickknacks to turn them into 'viking' souvenirs.

The fact of the matter is it wasn't a Norse symbol in any shape or form and we know it wasn't.

Because we know what it actually is.

It should be said though that even if we didn't, there would be no justification for claiming it dated back to pre-Christian times; the MS it's in is from 900 years later, the magic is clearly of a christian nature and there are no obvious pagan influences or any reason whatsoever to believe it'd date back so far. (except to those who want to believe in the survival of paganism far longer than we currently do.. I'll get to that) Contrary to your assertion there are no 'Viking Age elements' in it at all. It's not a topic dating far back either; being essentially unknown until Flower's book I talk about below came out in the 1980s, and really only popularized by the internet in the 2000s.

But we do know what it is, because there's a huge amount of parallels from across Europe for almost 500 years before the Huld manuscript. The "Vegvísir" and similar 8-spoked symbols here are so-called 'pentacles' that belong in a tradition of grimoires (books of magic) known as the "(Lesser) Key of Solomon" or Clavicula Salomonis. Like a lot of material relating to magic, alchemy and astrology, it seems to have come from the east; the earliest MSes we know of are in Greek. One such is Harley MS 5596 in the British Library, and here and here you can see the pages with its pentacles. The Key of Solomon manuscripts spread across Europe during the Renaissance; Robert Mathiesen at Brown University (in The Key of Solomon: Toward a Typology of the Manuscripts, Societas Magica Newsletter, #17, spring 2007) cataloged 122 of them which is not likely to be near all of them. Creating this table by century and language, which include Latin, Dutch, German, Italian, French, Czech (and over a dozen Greek ones not in that table), from the 15th century to the 19th. The main thrust of his paper was trying to establish a typology here; because basically none of these manuscripts are identical. Which is typical of the genre; people added, subtracted, made their own spin on things.

The pentacles are all similar yet all somewhat different in practically every manuscript, so the fact that the Vegvísir is not identical to the pentacles in Harley 5596 or other MSes isn't cause for concern; the Huld manuscripts pentacles are about as similar to the others as they are between each other. For reference, here are some other pentacles to look at, and I do suggest you do so: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. One of the things in Huld that underlines that it belongs in the Key of Solomon tradition is that it also contains pentacles named the 'Seal of Solomon' and 'Seal of David', which the Key of Solomon manuscripts often do. The whole trend of eastern magic supposedly dating back to King Solomon is a renaissance thing.

Now, as far as I know, nobody has researched the continental grimoires to see which one(s) best matches Huld, and thereby identify from whence this particular magic was transmitted to Iceland. Which is something worth researching in its own right. (but hardly 'viking studies')

This is not something 'viking historians' would know about, since they study stuff that's actually from the Viking Age and not stuff that's from 900 years later, just because the internet thinks it's got to be viking because Iceland. (not that they use the term 'viking historians'. On the contrary Scandinavian historians who study the Viking Age almost never use the term 'vikings' for Viking Age Scandinavians. They use it for people who were vikings. We're working quite hard to get away from the fictional viking construct of 19th century romanticism)

One might wonder why this this 'became a thing' despite being completely non-existent in the serious literature about the Viking Age. The answer to that is simply that the internet (and including Wikipedia to a large extent) is full of rumors and misconceptions, because most people online don't read Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, and a pretty substantial part of the history research on those countries are published in those languages and anyone in that field has to be able to read all those (in addition to Old Norse, and modern German, Medieval Latin and Middle Low German are good to have too). In fact in universities in Scandinavia you're often assumed to know Swedish, Danish and Norwegian from day one. (e.g. I've had an undergraduate course at Stockholm University where we used Danish textbooks and another where we had lectures in Norwegian, in topics unrelated to language studies. You're also usually permitted to write dissertations in any Scandinavian language)

Anyway, my point is that online, there's a dozen monolingually English-speaking viking fanboys for each one that actually reads Scandinavian. And just because people have the ability to read the research literature that others don't, doesn't mean they actually do so. Some of these are well meaning but just have romanticized and false notions. Some of them are less benign, as there's also crowd of racists and 'neo-pagans' who want to put their own spin on the history. (unaware that the whole concept of pre-Christian Scandinavia being a core part of Nordic identity is purely a 19th century construct, that's also largely been abandoned by Scandinavians)

So the 'vegvísir' came to prominence not due to the fact that it's in the serious literature (in English or not) about Viking Age Scandinavia, but because it was featured in the book "Galdrabók: An Icelandic Grimoire" by Stephen E. Flowers. This is not a scholarly work. Although Flowers would've had the qualifications to make one (he does have a degree), the guy is a neo-pagan and gives his spin on it. That book and his others are about the esoteric religion he's created for himself, not works of historical scholarship. To the neo-pagans (and romanticists) basically every popular custom is assumed to date back to time immemorial until proven otherwise, and the underlying assumption is that paganism lived on far longer than what historians accept today (which is basically that Scandinavian paganism died out in the 12th century). In the academic world such views were not uncommon 19th century, before source criticism was fully developed, but not these days. Other common biases are neglecting that Christian influences were a fact already during the Viking Age, and foreign influences before that. (there's a view here of a kind of 'pure' and homogeneous culture that never existed) And asserting that things like runes are inherently pagan and mysterious and magical. (there's very much an infatuation in general with imagery and symbols)

One example in the academic world of old is Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius, who was a folklorist intent on proving the people of his home country of Värend had been pagan into the 19th century. (Wärend och wirdarne, 1868) And in the nationalistic and romanticist thinking of the time, that would incidentally make them a bit more "authentic" Swedes than others. It's all nonsense and it's a huge pity because the actual research he did in collecting folklore is tainted by the fact that we don't have the primary accounts, just his interpretation of what he was told. Which is hard to trust when for instance every oblique reference to the devil was 'actually' about Odin and even witch-trial records were used as evidence of actual paganism.

Anyway so if Flowers had limited himself to translating Galdrabók (a 17th century Icelandic grimoire) it would've been useful, but his own opinions and interpretations are included throughout, without any research or even arguments to back them up. I came across it because I was researching a medieval magical tradition (also of continental origins) which appears in it, but it was so unserious that I just couldn't use it and cited Natan Lindqvist's edition from 1921 instead.