I'd thought about this early-on as well. Thirst is one of those survival mechanics that can be very interesting and deep, but is so easy to just make into a Tedium Meter. It needs to be more than just a timer on how frequently you need to take a swig from a water jug, no matter how dynamic and interconnected that timer is.
This game's Hunger system works because of the variety of the food groups, and how they all tie into different ways of making food, which are themselves tied into major progression mechanics like farming, milling, and preservation. Thirst would need to do something similar, with things like juices being more valuable to drink than just water, soups and stews getting their own hydration value to incentivize cooking them, higher-tiered water containers like leather waterskins and metal canteens, and probably either very streamlined and infrequent manual water collection in the later-game, or fully automatable water collection + storage, to ensure that even hundreds of hours of dealing with hydration doesn't become a major annoyance.
It also ties into other aspects of the game like World Generation. If water becomes a vital survival resource like food, then you'll want to have it relatively nearby wherever you decide to settle. The thing is, simple food is easy to forage on the fly anywhere, and seeds/bushes are easy to relocate to your home. Will the same be true for water? Will a player's choice in home location be constrained by the random fluctuations of procedural generation? Would people stop exploring/settling in deserts because they're too much of a pain?
Buckets currently require access to smithing, which is a not-insignificant progression gate for something as vital as hydration. Would water relocation have to become easier, and what other parts of the game would that affect?
It's a big and complicated topic. While I would absolutely love to see my dream-version of a Thirst mechanic implemented, actually doing so would be really hard to pull off, and I'd understand if the devs ultimately decide that a Thirst mechanic just wouldn't be worth trying to implement, and focus on other things instead.