So much of this season felt really forced. The writers clearly have an ending provided by GRRM, and are working towards that outcome at the expense of logic for the most part. So much of that is born of trying to justify Cersei's continued existence tbh.
For example - Daenerys not sacking King's Landing straight away. She had a greater army. She had three dragons. I know the show tried to justify it as being 'better for the people' if she doesn't attack directly, but the suggested alternative - an extended siege - would be even worse for them. I mean hell, she didn't even need to really use the dragons to attack the city. Just have them burn through one of the gates so that the Unsullied can get in, and you're done. They could have been well on their way to unifying the realm in preparation for the walkers already, but Cersei must live, and so the writers have the characters make ridiculous decisions.
The same could be said for Arya. I don't really believe that she would return to Winterfell in the books. Or at the very least that she would have hung around for so long after finding out Jon wasn't there. She spent years becoming a faceless man, and takes a break right after killing the Freys? Nah. Cersei is on her list. She'd absolutely be heading to kill her next in the books. But again, the writers can't allow Cersei to be killed, so they had to come up with something else for her to do instead.
Then there's the whole capture the wight fiasco. I imagine the writers decided early on that the Wall would be coming down this season, and decided that the Night King could use a Dragon to do it. So that meant they had to come up with way to get the dragons north of the wall, and it all came together in a really clumsy way imo.
I can see why people still enjoy the show - I don't even think it's necessarily bad these days myself, it's just really not what I signed up for in the beginning. I mean...when I think of the best moments of the show, I think of Littlefinger's amazing speech telling Varys about how chaos is a ladder. I think of Jaime in the bath with Brienne, telling her how he came to be known as the Kingslayer. I think of when Arya was Tywin's cupbearer. I think of Tyrion's trial, Arya's travels with The Hound, Robert and Cersei's conversation about their marriage. Character moments.
Even most of the action scenes in the earlier seasons were still primarily about shaping the characters - such as Oberyn's fight with The Mountain being more about getting a confession from him than the fight itself. The wildfire explosion wasn't the climax of the Battle of Blackwater episode - it was done in the first fifteen minutes and the rest of the drama came from Tyrion's rousing speech and Cersei being on the verge of poisoning Tommen to spare him being murdered when Stannis sacked the city. The action was just a vehicle to provide more character moments.
For the last few seasons though, the big moments have come from the action setpieces themselves. The Battle of the Bastards. Cersei blowing up the Sept. Euron attacking Yara's fleet, and then later attacking Casterly Rock and the Unsullied. Many of those scenes haven't even really mattered in the long run. Grey Worm and the Unsullied apparently got out of Casterly Rock with zero consequences. When Daenerys attacked Jaime's army with the dragons and Dothraki...what even came from that? No major characters died. It didn't win Daenerys the war - she literally abandoned the fight with the Lannisters immediately afterwards. You could skip that scene entirely and not be missing any real details from the story other than redshirts Randyll and Dickon's died. It's the most egregious example of an action scene existing purely for fanservice imo.
The best scene of the season for me was when the Hound returned to the cottage in episode 1, and ended up burying the father and daughter he'd left for dead years before. Great character moment.
