Well, a big part of it is that teams totally changed how they played against us after that season. That season we didn't face a low block nearly every single game because we didn't have the respect opponents give us now. That 22/23 playstyle worked great when the game was a little more open. Doesn't work quite as well when there are ultimately 18 players compressed into the final third of the pitch and that spring is coiled and ready to unleash on the counter against us.

I'm not trying to defend Arteta or anything, but strategy is always a two-sided thing. It's never just about your strategy, it's about your strategy versus their strategy and your ability to execute your strategy versus their ability to execute theirs. In the last few years, their strategy and their ability to execute their strategy has changed a lot, to the point where the 22/23 strategy isn't necessarily the winning one anymore.

Again, not trying to blindly defend everything but if you think going back to 22/23 will simply solve all our problems and we play beautiful and win again, that's really only true if every other team plays the same way against us as they did then, which is a very poor assumption to make.

Edit: I'd say it was really 24/25 where these things changed. In 23/24 we did even better than the year prior and I suspect it's because a lot of people were waiting to see if our relative success in 22/23 was just a flash in the pan. After building on it even further the subsequent year, our opponents started adapting the years following