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Notes -
The 14th has made the states subordinate to the Bill of Rights, but I wouldn't say that's the biggest step in state subordination. It was several decades earlier when the Supremacy Clause made states subordinate to the federal government in matters covered by the Constitution's short allowlist, and it wasn't until several decades later that cases like Wickard v. Filburn expanded federal powers from "short allowlist" to "do anything you feel like".
I would argue that the Supremacy Clause made state laws subordinate, but it didn't make the state governments themselves subordinate. At some level they were still treated at sovereign entities, bound together as a Constitutional Union. The laws of the Union necessarily superceded the laws of its member states, but the Union was created by those member states. After the Civil War the federal government really became an entity unto itself, with legitimacy explicitly beyond and above that of the states (deriving ultimately from "the people"). The 14th then re-codified this understanding (through, among other principles, incorporation) such that the state governments effectively exist in forms dictated by the federal government.
I think it's a minor irony of the Civil War: The North declared that the Southern States could not secede from the Union, and then, immediately after the war, amended the constitution such that secession becomes conceptually impossible. I suppose my argument here is non-obvious and not widespread, but I would suggest: the 14th amendment, by altering the relationship of the federal government to the states, contains an implicit recognition that the states had hitherto not been bound by the Constitution, and thus probably had the right to secede.
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