Riot has been lying quite uniformly on Irelia even for recent designs views

There was the claim about making an overall improvement on her Q that is otherwise no change. So they made it mathematically weaker than an auto, especially in the early game. Don't worry that recent 10% increased minion damage buff will surely help make those trades from hot garbage to warm garbage instead of reverting either the base AD nerf or the scaling nerf that was in the day one hotfix.

There was claims of improved support of champs in off role not long before her release was announced. Riot followed through with that lie by targeted hard nerfs to her jungle even before she was released live. And now there is the passive change which would objectively fall into QoL buff. It only looks like so much of an improvement because the bare was set so low in it's current state.

Riot has made claims, very quickly didn't follow through, and in those cases frankly actively went against those claims, therefore making them lies. Can't even hide behind the line of it was in the past when the teams design views were different for the offrole point like I'm sure others would bring up with graves when he was changed years ago. And there is no reason why there is no response to being shown that there was a pretty distinct mathematical botch up on a skill's tuning.