The sedan, designed well, is the ideal shape that you want to cleanly cut through the air with the least amount of wind resistance. As you go up in size the area that a car covers increases, as does weight, among other things. So you lose the efficiency of the body shape. And the higher off the ground you go, the more drag you get because now air deflects underneath the car and will 'catch' in different spots. That's why you take like a prius with front air deflectors, they design it that way to create a bit of a ground effect reducing drag.

The "CUV", compact SUV, is popular because it's higher off the ground. Because as other cars have gotten larger, people feel less safe with traditional sedans. Sedans, which worked well before because really people don't carry a lot with their cars most of the time. They've taken the hatchback design, since with rollover it's difficult to make those high in cargo capacity, and blown it up and thrown AWD on it. Take makes the car more expensive, it's more metal and plastic.

Doing that spoils the handling because now you've taken a chassis where the wheels would be parallel and lifted it. Making it so the body rolls more, providing a stiffer chassis feel, compounded by the additional weight for now larger components like the rear hatch. And you get a worse riding vehicle. I mean if the scope of the vehicles you've driven is just SUVs, then yeah, they might seem very sporty. But most of that is just marketing. That's why manufacturers don't really make sports cars into SUVs, because there's a lot of compromises in doing that.