Germicidal UV could make airborne diseases as rare as those carried by water

I have worked on such systems at Signify: There are numerous barriers to wider adoption except for very high risk situations. For instance: there have yet to be lawsuits to determine the risk of exposing people to UV. As you see in the comments below, any "UV" is considered dangerous by people not aware of the biological effects of various wavelenghts.

Besides this, excimer lamps have a low expected lifetime, of both the light source as well as the filter due to the high energy in the UV photons. This makes replacement (and maintenance cost) a real risk. This could be remedied by similar wavelength LEDs from companies like CrystalIS but these are expensive and very low power (only work germicidal on a short distance).

Prof. Brenner at Columbia University has first foreseen applications of 222nm in operating rooms, to prevent infection during surgery.

On the whole, it would need significant investment in both research, certification and risk analysis for this to become commercially viable, so while some of the technology is there, the market demand so far just is not -- post-pandemic.

Is there any reason why they can't just be installed inside air purifiers/ventilation?

Especially since you could probably get more mileage out of the same amount of light energy by forcing the air through a narrower passage, since only airborne particles are actually going to absorb any energy anyway, and air is mostly just empty air.

That solution is actually suggested in the article. However, that still leaves the cost issue mentioned by GP, and until that is solved, this will remain something for specialized applications (operating rooms) and maybe hypochondriac millionaires...

From a quick search, they are not millionaire-level expensive. Here for example is a 20W 222nm lamp that costs $436, with a lifetime of several thousand hours.

https://uv-can.com/products/gerani-far-uv-light?srsltid=AfmB...