Garen the protector?

Often when Garen is mentioned in patch notes recently, something about his core identity as a protector is mentioned. The 5.18 patch notes describe him "As a protector of the meek and timid." Every time I see something like this it bugs me and I finally decided to post about it:

He's NOT a protector right now. He's an avenger. His only method of "protecting" teammates is to silence enemies with a melee-range auto before they get their burst off, or dump everything on them and blow them up outright. But Garen is most effective at doing the latter after they already killed a teammate. That doesn't seem like very good protection to me.

Riot recognized Garen's gameplay patterns when they did his rework. They said in the 5.16 notes that Garen has "struggled to find a home as anything more than a makeshift assassin, diving backlines in hope of delivering swift justice." But, they go on to say that the reworked Garen's "purpose in-game now matches his job description; protecting the weak both in game and out."

To me, however, it doesn't seem like his gameplay pattern changed a whole lot.

This has pretty much zero bearing on balance, but I think it speaks to the synergy between champion identity and gameplay, which, in my opinion, has gotten kinda weird lately with things like Mordekaiser's rework, Fiora's ult, etc. I think it's a decent point of discussion. Thoughts?