Nearly everyone I know that LOVES Demacia feels this way, and most everyone else disagrees. I will attempt to unpack this and you can tell me what you think.
It seems to me that most of the people that were super pro-Demacia were making an awful lot of assumptions. The appeal of Demacia, to them, was that the state appeared to be a kind of a Utopian Switzerland. There has been this core assumption that life for Demacians was peaceful and happy, from top to bottom.
The thing is, the lore team never said that. YEARS ago, when people were making arguments about this, I was super skeptical. To me, Demacia seemed to embody a classic aristocracy-ruled society. Of course the leaders were better off than the commoners, and of course it wasn't all perfect for the entire nation. They had to fight wars with Noxus, at minimum, which is going to cause a substantial drain on resources, including the lives of citizens.
The fact that Noxus was highlighting its meritocratic elements meant, by contrast, that the other nations didn't have those. That means Demacia isn't meritocratic. It's ruled by a nobility that doesn't want the status quo upset. This undertone has always been there for people who were looking for it, it's just that all of our champions were from Demacian nobility. Garen, Lux, Lucian, Vayne, Sona... these are all champions with means. They dress and behave as though they have means. What Riot did, effectively, was try to hint to us that there were issues in Demacia below the surface.
The God-King VS event was the first time Riot pseudo-confirmed this for me. Darius and Garen, in that universe, were extrapolated to the most extreme version of themselves. And it made me say "huh" when people didn't expect that Garen would have become a tyrant. To those of us who aren't super in love with Demacia, this was an obvious and fitting direction. Peace in exchange for freedom; freedom in exchange for peace. People who are well-versed in political philosophy know that's the underlying dynamic of government in the first place. It's not controversial to base a couple of skins off of that classic tension. That's the world that all of us live in today, as well. Striking a balance between those two extremes is what makes governing autonomous human beings difficult. Every security requires a loss of some freedom, however small.
Sylas isn't Riot saying "Demacia sucks, everything there is terrible." It's Riot fleshing out their complicated world by dropping in one Demacian who isn't happy with the current arrangement. And his story made it clear why he wasn't. The Demacian nobles know, ostensibly, that it isn't fair to kill all mages to keep their nation safe. It's a trade that they have been wiling to make, a necessary sacrifice. And any time you moral dilemma like that, it's simply good storytelling to drop in characters who challenge that. Sylas is such a character. Now we have a Demacian champion who isn't nobility, and as s result, we're getting a different perspective on the nation.
I think it's an overreaction to say that Riot has ruined Demacia. It's more Demacian that it has ever been. Just as Noxus became more Noxus than ever when Swain was released. Now we know why Swain is trying to take over everything (vaguely). He sees a future threat, maybe from the Void, that will wipe out humanity, and he will sacrifice other nations to unify us against that threat. Noxus is still the conqueror, and Demacia is still standing up to them. The dynamic hasn't changed, it has just become more realistic. If it gets under your skin a little... good! That's kind of what it's supposed to do. Life is complicated, and good storytelling should reflect that.
