Damage creep isn't the problem. Dominance of anti-tank resources is.

I'll be brief because I want to get back to Three Houses, but I keep seeing people blaming damage creep for League's current state unironically and I want to say (again, because this isn't the first time) that the problem isn't "the damage", it's "the anti-tank resources".

We have Conqueror which shits on tanks, Shojin which boosts fighter/skirmisher scaling to shit on tanks, we reverted the marksman itemization update so it's easier for marksmen to deal with tanks and squishies at the same time, and we STILL have the standard anti-tank items in the form of Last Whisper items and Cleaver. Not to mention, many new fighters come with ways to scale into the later stages of the game instead of becoming shoddy split pushers like Irelia and Camille (Which is NOT a bad thing. Do NOT think I'm talking ill on Irelia and Camille here).

On top of this, tanks are weaker in the laning phase because of balance changes made to push fighters into higher levels of play (something dudes like Gbay99 and Hashinshin were asking for). We have fighters like Aatrox that are strong early, and we have Conqueror which helps skirmishers and fighters in top lane cut through tanks during the laning phase with bonus AD, life steal, AND true damage stacked together. On top of this, we have ranged bullies which are a pain for damn near anyone in top lane.

Here's where we have an issue: Tanks were blamed for being too good early without people paying attention to how they fall back to their team-oriented patterns later in the game. Now that they're struggling to live life in top lane in the early game and also have serious competition with scaling/snowballing in later stages of the game, top lane's given way to juggies, divers, and mages. If you have more damage dealers, you have more damage in the game and less people who will soak up that damage. If your tank performs poorly in lane, then even if you have a tank, that tank will soak up less damage before they die. If your tank is AP Malphite, he's a 1-shot bot, not a tank.

This is where the problem really lies when people say "damage creep". It's not that the damage is significantly worse than it might have been in some seasons past (at least at this point). It's more an issue with the fact that no one's playing champions that are good at absorbing damage anymore, so carry picks are exposed to high burst way easier than they were in seasons 5 or 7, when tanks were literally everywhere.

Short version: The problem isn't that we're doing 10k damage rotations. The problem is that our 1k damage rotations, which we've always had in some form or another, are going onto 900 hp targets instead of the 3k hp targets since no one's playing the 3k hp characters. There is a plethora of both early and late game oriented reasons as to why people have been gravitating from top lane tanks for a long time now in both solo queue and the pro space, and since solo queue junglers love assassins and divers way more than a Sejuani or Zac, solo queue just doesn't have tanks even when pro play can afford not having a top lane tank in exchange for a jg tank, which makes games super volatile and "1-shotty" in solo queue.