Was there ever a meta or was it something we created.
It's been bothering me for a while now if the meta ever really existed or if people just starting playing champs in a lane and it just became the norm?
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The "meta" of a game refers to the strategies used in competitive play. League of Legends has a meta-game of 1 person per lane, with a support player at bottom lane and the jungler. The champions suitable for each of these roles fluctuates over time, as abilities are patched, new champions are released, and new ways to play old champions are found. If one champion becomes popular, so do the champions that best exploit the popular champion's weaknesses, and this further ripples outwards in a 126+ choice game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. All of these things comprise the "meta", as they are not mechanics enforced by the game, but rather the players. So yeah...players create the meta.
You just described what a meta is. There's a few definitions of the word 'meta', and I'm not sure how accurate they all are, but one is a acronym, standing for "Most Efficient Tactics Available". The Meta arises from what players see as the best way to play the game. It''s why we went from having the ADC in mid to putting them bot, as people realized that mages scale better with levels, and AD champions with items (put the level scaling where they have more XP, put the item scaling elsewhere). Riot does occasionally make changes that can help influence a meta (more of they make balance changes that bring a new class back into the meta. See Cinderhulk in Season 5), but the meta is established by what players discover to be the easiest way to win the game.
or if people just starting playing champs in a lane and it just became the norm?
Friend, that is a meta :P
For a while after release there wasn't really a meta. It took a few months and we eventually started to see something like a meta. Your ADC would go mid since it was the fastest lane, mages would go top, and then your bulk and someone else went bot. Jungle was pretty stale at the time since there were very few champs who could reliably jungle. WW was the king of the jungle for the longest time. Udyr was also really strong, but other than him your most popular jungles were Fiddle and Amumu. This was long before Lee Sin so he isn't on the list, but he did come later. Even at this point, other than junglers, there wasn't really a champion who stood far ahead than others in their roles.
I forget when, but eventually mages started going mid and used their burst to kill ADCs and gain a quick advantage. This forced ADCs to start going bot with a support and thus bulky champs would take the top lane. This was probably the earliest actual meta that started up. Top would be a lane that focused on aggression and getting ahead, mid lane was mostly control and aoe centered (tons of Karthus, Galio, and Anivia), bot was the scaling lane and jungle was focused on vision control.
So to answer your question, yes, players create the meta. However each season or even champ release had a huge influence on what is strong in that meta back then. Just going to give one example, Shyvana was the last champion released in S1. With S2 having a much weaker jungle, Moscow 5 used Shyvana to counter jungle older junglers to a terrifying degree and created a new meta of controlling junglers.
the meta is just what champs work best where, for example, the jungle meta consists of champs that have reliable clear, sustain and ganking potential, as those are what work best, the top meta is usually bruisers or tanks because if you were to go a squishy ap mage top you'd probably lose your lane, the same goes for other lanes as well, it's just what happens to work best with the current state of the game...