'Mages are OP but if anything of them isn't it proves the designers didn't do their job'.
Mages are OP the ability to place wards wasn't something that made them OP though. It's like they went out of their way to target all of the things that were not over powered and weaken them while leaving the broken things intact. Ritual spells were not broken in 5e, alchemy was weak in 5e, why make these things weaker while making Summoning the thing that was the most OP even more OP.
A rating 4 ward again built by a super specialized ward making mage using a large chunk of edge would be bypassed by a mage high school kid trying to peep on his neighbor. Wards are described as a basic ritual mages first learn, but apparently none can cast. A rating 6+6 magic+6 teamwork would on average fail at making a ward without edge. It barely can be made by a team of professional mages using edge. If it was intended just for NPCs as some setting material, save it for a later source book.
The math on many of these rituals don't workout for the setting unless you assume all NPCs are tossing massive dice pools for some reason and still making wards. The cable installer of magic is tossing 20+ die pools with a team of highly professional mages backing him up to ward up basic offices to a decent level. The math not working without these massive die pools is why it looks like they didn't really test this section. Ritual magic isn't common in many campaigns, so I can see why it never got tested but I think it is pretty obvious the math is off here. Make the threshold of the ward the rating of the ward you are trying to make, you have to scrounge on average 18 dice to make a rating 6 ward which is a pretty common ward you want to go past that your die pool is going to have to be teamwork massive.
Making some death spell from 3,000 miles away hard is one thing, wards, watchers, healing circles all should be fairly easy to accomplish as they don't make the mage OP.
