Suga, it's hard to evaluate unarmed fighting techniques on a basis of effectiveness.
Warfare has historically been based a hell of a lot more on armed fighting than unarmed. There's also the positive of armed combat, being that bad techniques have literally died out: their users have never lived to teach them onward.
Martial arts instructors are in a very different position to military trainers in the ancient and medieval age. How many martial arts instructors of past could claim that they have survived several battles against relatively equal opponents, when others have died? It is an entire different world.
Even Miyamoto Musashi, the famous Japanese swordsman, actually took part in battles, fighting for an army on the frontline and engaging in armed combat against other trained soldiers. Miyamoto Musashi's swordfighting/polearm technique has supposedly allowed him to survive the battlefield, and that is why we can't just completely disregard his speak about dueling as nonsense. Even if dueling has different "rules" as opposed to fighting in a formation against a formation.
Even someone like Bruce Lee, who supposedly got into a lot of fights in his youth, has never been in that kind of situation, fighting to the death with roughly equally trained, equally skilled warriors. Sword and spear instructors of the ancient and medieval age probably usually have, and they're training warriors who are to do battle.
We're lucky we have a pretty good idea of what ancient and medieval warfare was like and what the techniques were. Even then, the techniques and training meant entirely different things to warriors of old and modern day HEMA enthusiasts. We're just not going to war with spears and swords like we used to: so of course we're not gonna be as good at it as they were historically. Professional warriors were trained from young age to partake in something that could potentially kill them very quickly: it wasn't a bunch of joking around with techniques and philosophies.
Hell, the early Roman legions were mostly composed of draftees, young Roman male citizens of an appropriate age who were to serve for several years in combat. It was no joke at all. Just the physical requirements to march with the legion were really something difficult to understand from a modern normal civilian's perspective, let alone fighting on the battlefield.
The background for HEMA and other related armed fighting techniques come from this kind of reality. While historically unarmed martial arts have been taught to warriors, as unarmed fighting is most likely the basis of all close range fighting as it's just using natural weapons, it's just not the same. I think it mattered a lot more how effective your spear-fighting techniques were than how effective your boxing or wrestling techniques were.
Although I can't help but feel like I'm missing something, like the appliance of martial arts in other kinds of combat. But how often did civilians or dare I say even warriors really fight completely unarmed, in a serious situation?
tl;dr There has never been a cohort of Wing Chun masters fighting on a battlefield.