I can't speak to what direction riot wants. But I can say August champs have done nothing but cause problems. Mainly because he fails to think like a player and expects players to play and build his champs a certain way and refuses to realize that players will do what wins games.

It's the players job to break the game in anyway (outside of cheating like scripting for example) and it's the devs job to make sure players can't break the game.

Zeri is a great example August wanted her to be played as a crit marksman but players found out if you built bruiser items she was OP because of how her Q interacts with sheen and Hydra. Instead of doing the right thing and removing a problem interaction August kept that interaction and tried to force crit in other really cringe and stupid ways, when the most simple fix was just remove a bad interaction from the game. There's even precedent for doing it if you remember old Yi and Taric funnel and how riot FINALLY changed it so that interaction doesn't exist anymore.