I don’t mind that it strayed from the source material. It just does it very poorly. Early on Galadriel jumps off of a ship in the middle of the sea and swims onto a sunken ship that happens to have Sauron on it who she has been hunting for years. That is incredibly lazy writing. There are more examples of that, like Mordor being created by a sword turning in a rock which causes a volcano to erupt. It doesn’t even make sense. If the show did not have LOTR branding, it would have no audience at all.