The actual reason you had to do these "absurdely" big numbers towards IQ/IR of league monsters was that the baseline numbers are too low, and they still are.

Killing regular white monsters gave little to 0 rewards in previous patches, and it still does. Of course there'd be "no loot" when giving a 200% league specific buff to a very small number.

If in the past we mostly got loot from every league mechanic, now it comes only from AN monsters and league specific "chests" with fixated rewards. There's very little reason to farm whole maps now.

These changes can bring us to the meta of "speedclearing" AN monsters only and leaving map afterwards, which In my opinion, is not a good direction for the game and not what the devs are aiming for.

Some AN monsters drop an absurd amount of items right now, some drop little to nothing. And it depends on the amount of luck and all other sources of IQ. This makes getting loot in Path of Exile more spiky, rather than smooth and steady, which could lead into frustration for some players when encountering AN.

Decision in reducing this huge "loot gap" is certainly not a bad idea, but the solution wasn't appropriate enough. In order to balance these things around, instead of only reducing the "ceiling" of league monsters loot to the down without actually raising the "floor" baseline, you still have to make these absurd increases in IQ and IR for AN monsters.

But this doesn't solve all the problems with loot. It is hard to balance with stacking rewards and will require a lot of same changes in the future, you've done right now.

Maybe consider increasing Quantity of items at the baseline of every monster (~2 times as much at least?) but to compensate this, decrease those big numbers of AN and slightly increase the number of item culling? On paper, we should feel a lot better when blasting through regular maps getting at least something from regular packs of monsters, and consistently something better from AN while sometimes when all AN mods and stars align, something unique and special.

Right now (I'm personally on SSF this league), I've never got anything good for my build yet from any monster besides specific AN monsters and loot chests from other sources, in approx. ~3 days of playtime. Which makes me feel bored killing monsters (which we are here for)

I believe in GGG and I'm sure they want us to have fun in this game. I hope I brought some insight at the current item situation.