Disclaimer: I have Read A Book, or rather two books: Herodotus' Histories and Mary Bachvarova's _From Hittite to Homer_ (2006). Those two have been fairly persuasive to me that the characters and plot of the Iliad were cribbed from an earlier Hittite source called _The Song of Release_, which in turn cribbed them from earlier Sumerian poetry. In addition Bachvarova says the name "Akhileos" is Hellenized from an earlier non-Greek source, although which source is unclear.
Other information is that there do seem to have been several historical sacks of Troy, which kept being rebuilt because of its location, but it's unclear whether Homer is referring to the sack of Troy around 1000 BCE or around 1300 BCE. There is also not universal agreement on where Troy was located; most scholars place Troy on the east shore of Asia Minor while a few weirdos place it on the shore of the Black Sea. In any case, it's definitive that the sack of Troy described in the Iliad occurred for economic reasons rather than any romantic reason such as the abduction of a queen by the Trojans. There are hundreds of thousands of years of established human practice of war parties from one human group raiding another human group to abduct women of child-bearing age in order to minimize the risk of local extinction from not enough reproduction, especially when the infant mortality rate was sky-high, and even queens such as Pasiphae of the Minoans gave birth to at least 12 sons. Herodotus is dismissive of "a little competitive princess-rustling" where various cities take turns kidnapping each other's royal princess and, apart from demands for return and reparation that get refused, little happens other than the kidnapped princess living out her life and dying in the foreign land. The Romance of a huge naval fleet sacking an entire city over a kidnapped princess very likely relates to a very rare real event that it would be difficult to identify now because we have no idea how long ago it was and how many times that unusual story was retold.
Or so it seems to me after reading Bachvarova and Herodotus. If the real scholars of this subreddit disagree I'd love to hear why. I'm just a lay enthusiast who did some reading; I don't really have substantive knowledge of these things.
I'm so happy that you've read Bachvarova's book. She's absolutely brilliant, and her core premise – that Greek-speakers borrowed motifs from Near Eastern mythological traditions through participation in festivals in the Syro-Anatolian region – is pretty convincing, I think.
There's always more to be said on this topic, but a now deleted poster gave a great summary of what we know in Did the Trojan War actually happen? In short, while a Greek-Trojan War might've happened, there's very little in the way of firm evidence for it.
Additionally, I summarized what we know about Hittite-Mycenaean relations in Luwians role in the Agean civilisation?