So the effective change preseason brought was... absolutely nothing?

I like the turret shields, but they are too weak, not on all turrets, AND give the enemy player gold. Well, not really something that impacts much.

I gave them until preseason, but as we can see, Riot is ABSOLUTELY HELLBENT TO HAVE THEIR OWN GAME DIE. I can't explain it otherwise - Season 8 was the most disliked season of all League and I never had a friendlist so empty, and yet preseason picks up right where we left off with some irrelevant changes to appease the complainers that will probably get slowly reverted anyways. People told them what the cause was, and that they would please have the game back that they originally signed up for, but at this point Riot is just ignoring them intentionally.

Well, I guess they want people to divert full attention to this "Legends of Runeterra" MMO or whatever is coming in the future so those two playerbases don't cannibalize each other. So they turn League into a damage-overloaded splatterfest for casuals with no strategic (and ironically, esport-) value whatsoever only to then hope people jump on whatever else they throw out then.

If literally half the world tells you to not keep going into a direction for years, has solid arguments for it, and you do it anyways, I can only explain this with being completly intentional to kill the game off.