>I think people just can't accept that GoT was pretty poor for like half it's run and a lot of the final season issues were a result of mistakes made years before. People just thought the payoff would correct it or something

I think there's a lot of truth to that. As a fan of the books, I found even a lot of the choices they were making in S4 (such as cutting the Tysha reveal out) gave me pause about the direction of things. But yeah, S5 was really mediocre and contained some screamingly poor and lazy writing Season 6 was also really dull and draggy for much of its runtime. S7 is just lol. The idea that things just went south in S7/8 has always been odd to me.