In my opinion Riot's rework philosophy is promoting one dimensional champions

Here are two bullet points from the mid year mage update posts in the dev corner: Brand:

• Outside of Liandry/Rylai, there’s not much reason to pick Brand over other AoE mages unless he simply deals more damage than they do. Tough to balance.

and VelKoz:

• Generalist damage output without meaningful utility means he must be balanced around simply doing more damage than anyone else

To me, it seems that this train of thought is saying "Champions should be able to do one thing, and if other champions can also do that one thing, then they should all do it in a different way. From this difference in how they do one thing arises their Strategic Identity."

This completely ignores any secondary strengths the champions have, and I think that's wrong/bad/sad etc. If I want an AoE mage, we already know I want some AoE damage, and the rest of the team will have abilities which all compliment holding the enemy team in a place and dumping on them. I can then select from AoE mages based on what else they do well besides AoE and how that fits into my team comp and against the enemy team comp. You can pick an AoE mage that also has better waveclear than other AoE mages, or better poke, or better CC, or a middling general strength out of all of them if that's what you want, and that should be OK.

We've seen this in other reworks, too. Take, for example, Quinn. To be honest and upfront, I don't like the Quinn rework, but I understand that a lot of people do, and if the community as a whole feels better about it than that's something I can appreciate. But, in removing the combat half of her ult, they removed her assassin pattern completely and instead turned her into a race car. If her assassin pattern was toxic, fine. If she was oppressive against a lot of toplaners and a too-reliable assassin against squishies, fine (I abused those two qualities a lot to the tune of an almost 70% winrate). In light of those facts I accept that they needed to change her for the health of the game. But I think it's hard to argue that she didn't get a lot more one-dimensional as a champion.

TL;DR secondary strengths in a champion are a viable source of strategic identity and should be encouraged and preserved.