on the one hand it's tragic but on the other hand it's completely understandable, and in fact pretty much unavoidable unless you had just an astoundingly spectacular creative team, and GoT has never had that.
let me preface this by stating that i read a lot of fantasy, and i have been doing so for 25 years - it's my primary leisure activity, i've read literally hundreds of fantasy novels in my life.
GoT the books has never been spectacularly good in any significant way, but what made it stand out was that it felt like a story which had characters that we followed, but we were following them through the story instead of following them through their own narrative.
this gives the books a sense of realism and of consequence, that actions have meaning and choices matter, that as a general rule characters don't have plot armor and so if shit hits the fan, anything could happen. that makes them refreshing and vibrant in a genre that is normally quite tame and procedural.
the big problem with the show and how it was obvious that where it's come to was inevitable is in the fact that it's never been a particularly good adaptation of the books.
sure it has a big budget and it's well produced and has good actors, but the story being told within the show was never more than the loosest outline version of the books, simply getting from point A to point B within the book's plot in a way that makes coherent sense but loses all the nuance - which in one sense is understandable given production and budgets and network needs and all that, but it really shines a lot on the issue at the core of the show: from the very start, every time it deviated from the source material, it was terrible.
cut out a major scene or subplot? it's a huge chunk of the fiber of the narrative being ripped out.
added something new that isn't in the books? it's a shitshow of bad writing, gratuitous nudity, or both.
recontextualized or changed certain characters, emphasized one, reduced the role of another? it's stupid and makes no sense and is done solely and very obviously for the purposes of fan service and production, or what we'll call "narrative for the purposes of show reasons".
so the writing was on the wall from the very beginning that when they no longer had the plot beats from the books to stick to, shit was gonna go massively off the rails.
this started happening even before the show eclipsed the books, where they so utterly rat-fucked the side plot going on in dorne, wrecked pretty much everything about danaerys, messed up the side plots with brienne and the hound, made arya's journey and induction into the house of white and black utterly ridiculous, fucked up all the stuff with the night's watch and wildlings, etc etc.
the show has been totally fucking everything up since like season 5, it just had enough of the books to still adhere to that it had some semblance of hope.
but pretty much as soon as the show went past the books it's been obvious that the creative team on GoT just isn't very good.
and i don't mean to armchair too much on this, god knows i couldn't make a TV show, but it's clear the team that this crew has just isn't good at writing a story that follows the blueprint set forth by the source material.
once the show surpassed the books, it started becoming "a show" - the narrative doesn't follow logic, main characters have invincible plot armor, fan favorites get shoe-horned into whatever situation they think will excite the fans, and the show is cut back in scale or number of episodes based on scheduling conflicts or budgets or whatever other crap it is that derails TV projects, etc etc.
i don't think GoT was ever an especially great show, it was just an adequate adaptation of some surprisingly decent books, but it never had a writing team that could handle making a show on their own.
it's been coasting off the first 3 seasons for like 4 years now, this crapfest it is now just isn't too surprising.
