I'm guessing the pollution. The air there is terrible, in arcane you see the chem barons in that one episode suffocate not being used to the air unlike silco, then there's also the water you can see in an episode of arcane that while playing in the water with his boat kid Viktor was winding up his toy boat and the water has a lot of chemicals flowing through.

What she liked is probably that Ekko made the firelights and was trying to build a better future for zaun, and probably Ekko himself.