Yes, it is ridiculous. There's certainly no compelling reason to think of it as real (even if you think of the Trojan War as real, which is already a stretch).

That doesn't stop some people from trying to keep it in the story by rationalising it -- finding an interpretation that makes it sound like something more plausible. But rationalisation isn't a tool for turning bad historical data into good data. It's an excuse to carry on using bad data, making things up as you go.

The rationalisation attitude is what produces things like the Wikipedia section on "Factual explanations" of the horse. It reports three possible "explanations":

1. "horse" = a battering ram or some other sort of siege engine
2. the gift was actually a (wooden) ship, with enemy soldiers inside
3. "horse" = symbol of Poseidon, who is also god of earthquakes, therefore "wooden horse" = an earthquake, such as the one that damaged the walls of the citadel of Troy around 1280 BCE

Each of these is tendentious, though the article supplies citations and reasoning to support them all. Let's look at them one by one:

1. Siege engine. The article cites Michael Wood for the idea, even crediting him with the point that rams did exist in 12th century BCE Assyrian warfare -- even though Wood flatly rejects the idea. What Wood actually says is that even though rams were used in Assyria, there's zero evidence of anything of the kind in the Aegean Sea. The actual origin of the idea is the 2nd century CE writer Pausanias, who knew precisely nothing about Bronze Age archaeology.

2. Ship. This may be a tad ad hominem, but I think it's still worth observing: the originators of this idea, as credited in the article, aren't ancient historians in any sensible definition of the term. They're ex-military, with no background in Mediterranean archaeology, but interested in popular military history. Subsequent references do cite a couple of marine archaeologists: it seems to me they would have been better sources to open with.

The whole paragraph reeks with tendentiousness. The fact that the Greeks use ships to get to and away from Troy is very thin reasoning. It's true that the Odyssey does once refer to ships as "horses of the sea" (but wouldn't it be nice if the article actually cited the actual source, instead of a Spanish-language article without a page reference? For the record, it's at Odyssey 4.708). "Sea-horses" and "wave-horses" are a popular kenning in Old English and Norse poetry: does that imply that every time a horse is mentioned, it's actually a ship? Is Odin's horse a ship as well? Please.

Now, as it happens, we do have some peer-reviewed sources that support the idea: (a) a 1980 article by Enrico Livrea in Rheinisches Museum examines a snippet of a very obscure epic poet named Euphorion that claims the "horse" refers to a ship; (b) here's a chapter from a 2018 book that talks about how the wooden horse is metaphorically blurred with the ship the Argo, in the late antique epic poet Quintus of Smyrna; (c) as Wikipedia points out, there are a couple of maritime archaeologists, Francesco Tiboni and Joaquin Ruiz de Arbulo, who have become fans of the idea. But the thing about Phoenician ships dangles on very thin evidence. And in any case all of these points are either a thousand kilometres or a thousand years away from the legend of Troy.

Incidentally, here's the earliest pictorial depiction of the Trojan horse, circa 700-650 BCE. It doesn't look like a ship.

3. Earthquake. This is the only one of these rationalisations that you'll actually find in some books about Bronze Age Troy (Eric Cline's book on the Trojan War mentions it in passing, which is more than it deserves). It's still speculation, and even the Wikipedia article doesn't buy it. For one thing, bear in mind that Poseidon supports the Trojan side in the war. At Iliad 20.57 he even causes an earthquake to aid them in battle.

[EDIT: stupid brainfart on my part here, of course Poseidon supports the Greeks. The usual objection to this point is really that he helped build the walls of Troy. The earthquake idea is still pretty silly though.]

I've spent a certain amount of time on the tenuous evidence cited for these points, but the main point here isn't that the evidence doesn't stack up. It's the initial idea that's the problem.

We've got people who dreamed up a rationalisation, hunting around looking for scraps to make their rationalisation sound a bit better. It's all arse backwards. There was never a good reason to dream up the rationalisation in the first place.

The wooden horse doesn't need an explanation any more than Gideon's horn does, or Oedipus's sphinx, or Beowulf's dragon. Mythical stories use mythical plot devices. That's kind of the point. You might say that it'd be a bigger surprise if the myth was full of plausible things.