I mean this so called Early game snowball meta, has kinda put us in a bit of a bind for ADC balance.
All throughout Season 6, everyone complained about the early game power house that was a result of the korean Armor pen builds. So when the Assassin update came around. Riot was like, "okay, were toneing back the early power from these item builds, lets give late game hyper carries a chance."
But they never got that chance, because we were still in an early game meta. And that created the narrative that ADC's were completely useless. (compounded by the Jungle changes) It also led to the shenanigans with Ziggs bot lane, and people hated that too.
Riot had then brought back some of the Early game power that Lethality use to have. ( along with fixing some of the Jungle problems.) And now we have come full circle to, "Lethaliity makes Ranged AD Oppressive."