Did the support item updates really improve the role?

I think the easy answer to this question is yes, but it was not an improvement in the direction I wanted personally. I think it made the role more powerful (the new items are incredibly cheap and powerful), but it did not make the role more interesting. The reason they changed locket in the first place was that it was boring that it had become mandatory for supports. In a way, the support item changes have compounded this problem. Locket and redemption are both over-tuned and too efficient to pass up. So much so that both these items have become must haves for players trying to maximize their own impact on the game.

In my opinion, most supports are now even more locked in to a specific buildpath than they were before. Before it was Support item -> sightstone -> Aegis (and then the choice of either locket or banner) then the player had some freedom to choose. Sure this was a lot of gold that was basically already laid out for you to spend, but now the problem is just as bad if not worse. Now it seems you have to go: Support item -> sightstone -> locket -> redemption -> ruby sightstone (for the passive). Even the small choice between locket and banner is gone since locket is clearly better on every support. So it seems like you're locked into 3 items before you even have an interesting itemization choice to make. Sure support is better from a power point of view, and redemption is a lot more interactive of an item than locket, but from an item diversity standpoint, it seems that most supports are more limited than they've been, which for me has made the role a lot less interesting. Sure there are exceptions, like a couple of supports might want chalice, and who even knows what the hell support Zilean is supposed to build, but for the most part, it seems pretty predetermined.

TLDR: New support items have made supports stronger, but have limited item diversity (which is obviously problematic since they changed aegis because of it in the first place).