False reports affect honor

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Riot has clarified repeatedly that reports do nothing except trigger a review.

People getting banned for playing offmeta are actually getting banned for one of the following things: feeding, getting in flame wars with their team, afking afterwards, or all of the above.

Also confirmation bias, echo chamber, and meaningless sample sizes.

Incidentally i have been playing bizarre off-meta stuff very frequiently for years, and never received as much as a warning for it, despite getting reported very often, usually by ADCs who are getting carried by support garen ect.

Riot has repeatedly lied about it or at least used the term misleadingly. If there isn't report agreement, it's true that you won't be punished but if there is, you definitely will have it count against you regardless of whether the reports were justified. They do not have an advanced AI system truly understanding context, humor and language (literally no one does so please don't pretend they do when they can barely solve primitive technical problems with their client and engine... they'll ban players for even quoting toxic players when getting offended ex: "very negative behavior, Mr.Wiggles just called me "") and practical play has proven that it's an automated system based on keywords, report frequency and report agreement. Singed support is one such case where the guy was not toxic at all and merely went Singed support with Smite, counterjungled the enemy and then went back bot. He managed to do so maining it in Platinum ELO and still got a suspension till a thread blew up on reddit. There are many such cases if you care to look. They aren't the norm but they prove this is how the system works especially with certain "evidence" logs which are complete nonsense and don't even seem toxic. In that case, said player likely was toxic before and thus very close to a punishment threshold so even a game where he wasn't, if some people dislike him, will take him over the edge with false evidence.