Yeah, this very much is the case. Most League players aren't game designers and will never be game designers, so they don't try to understand things from a mechanical perspective. The reasoning why is extremely petty and stupid.
As someone who played a lot of pre-work Taric, Sion, and Poppy, for example, I knew they had a lot of gameplay problems. Taric was a coincidental support, that his skills benefited those around them coincidentally and not intentionally, and he could easily create a stat discrepancy equal to almost three Baron buffs... on top of the actual Baron buff. He was also too good as a supposed support tank to fend off AD brawlers, assassins, and even some ADCs by himself, even if they ganged up on him. His new design still reflects all that I liked about the old Taric (the AOE heal, the melee brawling and spell cycling, the shielding and passive armor bonus, and the stuns which is also now an AOE), but it's much better, makes him less capable of handing a gang of assassins their own ass (though he can still win duels with them consistently) and his benefits to others as the support is now considerably more intentional and beneficial.
Poppy had the feast-or-famine problem to probably the most extreme. Her concept was a melee Yordle who could determination herself through lethal damage while dishing out huge amounts in return, but in practice she had a terrible lane farm, even more terrible mana costs and pool, and once she started getting kills, she was almost unstoppable. Her ult also allowed her to target the weakest champion and then pick off the rest of the team with, as I've described it before, the nuclear weapon she calls a hammer. Her rework kept around her tough as nails tank mechanics while replacing a lot of that damage potential (though it still exists) with more crowd control (additionally to stop dashes) so she could better line herself up to slam the enemy into a wall. Her ult was also changed to benefit the rest of her team as well as herself by physically removing enemies from a fight by launching them across the map. Teamfights become much more daunting if she's able to suddenly displace half or most of your team. She's also much prettier now.
Sion's character was a joke. His design was censored in China (the bone arm, primarily), and his style was an undying juggernaut who could berserker rush through massive amounts of damage while getting increasingly unkillable as the game wore on. There was almost no part of his mechanics that weren't a problem. He scaled off of AP (which had a ratio of 1:2!) while his E enhanced his AD, and his ult gave him a ton of lifesteal (lifesteal tanks being almost impossible to properly balanced). If you built him as a caster, he could target stun a single target for up to 1500 damage, and his W could absorb 1500 damage and then dish the same amount if he got too close and the shield was still up. If you built him as a brawler, he could 1v5 the entire team with a single ult, and he snowballed quickly through normal gameplay. He still has the shield (though it scales off of health now), his stun is in an AOE from one giant swing of the axe (which also demonstrates how he uses the axe crudely and with pure strength, unlike Darius' brutal precision), and his undying juggernaut status was moved to his passive (which originally was based off of luck and was shitarse otherwise), making him a continued threat even after you kill him.
There's also Sejuani, who I've played more than a fair number of times in the past, and her sudden rework that was not expected, but understandable. Sejuani's main issue that Riot tackled was that outside of a charge or an ult, she was more or less a passive threat that would eat away at your health bar at a mostly gradual pace. Her W and E were primarily reworked to make her attacks on an enemy much more direct and to heavily penalize an enemy for ignoring her, providing her with a much more distinctive menace and giving you the enemy more incentive to target her first or be more wary of her.
Ryze I didn't play much, but I knew what Riot's intentions were when I played his rework. Ryze is infamous for having some of the lowest cooldowns in the game. New Ryze continues this trend, but now he's more structured. He uses his E to start a combo and his Q and W as a follow-up, while providing a movement speed bonus and a shield whenever he successfully pulls off a combo, and there are multiple ways you can actually pull off a combo. His main issue now (and especially when it came to the old hipsters who played his old form) comes from the fact that he's one of the most mechanically complex champions in the game now, much less one that only costs 450 IP. If you try to play him like you once could, by mashing the buttons in whatever order his cooldowns would allow, then you're going to be in for a bad time.
I even made a journal last year that deconstructed old Yorick and his design, character, and gameplay issues. And sure enough, I got a few Yorick hipsters coming in to try and defend his old everything, even as I predicted it.
A lot of the hipsterism comes from people not understanding gameplay mechanics or design combined with having invested so much into the character that it has clouded their judgement by making them think they now see something unique that other's can't (also known as the sunk cost fallacy). Some have argued that his ghouls made his mechanics "subtle", which doesn't make sense, first off, and secondly, if the character relies on being too "subtle" for others to understand (characters that can stealth is not being subtle; that's being an active threat to always remain vigilant for), then that character is shite.
I happen to be immune to these problems, even as I had three of my favorite champions reworked (I still have reason and desire to play them, even if I don't get the opportunity much these days as I play other champions), and two more added to my favorite list.
