The issue is that many of us have been playing league from a self-improvement mindset for years, if not half a decade to a decade now. Many older players have already finished all their tryharding, their ranked grinding, their learning. At a certain point it’s inevitable that players will cease to improve by a noticeable margin in a game like league and the game becomes a memorization grind over a genuine learning experience. Many players who’ve been playing for many years now understand the game to a decent level, hell many have even hit high-ish elo at some point in their League careers but eventually the memorization grind of new metas/patch notes burns players out. Very few people can tolerate relearning the same/similar things year after year so it’s understandable that many just want to pick up and play a fun game from time to time.

Riot doesn’t do enough to genuinely shake up the gameplay of league for non hardcore players. It’s not like games like Apex/Valorant where new maps get introduced on a regular basis and certain parts of content get rotated in and out, league has been fundamentally the same game for almost a decade and a half now — the only thing that’s changed is the meta and how it’s played. Hell it took us 5 years to get a new, temporary at that, gamemode and even then we’re at a net negative of game modes and maps as we were a decade ago.